downward. A top-to-bottom scenario, from light to increasing darkness, that dramatically inflects her expression with a rigor of concentration that, were we to rely on the eyes alone, might come across as mere distraction. At the same time, the grays and greens infusing the sallow complexion of the upper half of her face, which serve to distinguish her visage from the gold background, form a neat sky–ground parallel: face as landscape; thought as action. Again and again, we find this stylistic showdown between the primitive and the hyperreal in Kovalcikova’s depictions. It is this tendency that links her approach to a quintessentially modernist tradition—there’s a clear overlay in thematics, for instance, between Manet’s Olympia and a painting like Misty (Foggy) , 2017, though hints of painters as diverse as Rousseau and Picasso can also be detected in the cryptic weirdness of paintings like Space Ranger , 2023, featuring a horned and robed female specimen riding a bull in some reddened apocalyptic landscape. This is all to assert that, in the advanced machinery of contemporary painting, Stanislava Kovalcikova plays a starring role. Through an incredible process of deliberation, she arrives at her own language of myth, madness, and the macabre, infusing these seemingly dark themes with her own subtle ironies and inflections of brightness, all of which reveal a highly refined and sophisticated sensibility at play. To engulf oneself in her paintings is to penetrate the deeper surfaces of a reality to which we all have access, but are seldom able to perceive on our own. She gifts us the possibility of endless reflection.
Stanislava Kovalcikova, Misty (Foggy) , 2017. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai
Stanislava Kovalcikova, Space Ranger , 2023. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai
Aspen Art Museum
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