Exhibition Guide
STANISLAVA KOVALCIKOVA
in the company of
VALIE EXPORT
March 5–April 7, 2024
Aspen Art Museum
June 22, 2023–April 7, 2024 A Lover’s Discourse
March 5–April 7, 2024
world embedded within our world. Her two paintings Silence and Borders (2023) and Train of Thought (2024) unravel in a psychological dimension that feels at once familiar and rejected, desirable yet unspeakable. Eating as a bonding and synchronizing—even ritualistic—experience among a group of individuals underpins the dynamic of the family portrait in EXPORT’s film. In turn, in Kovalcikova’s cosmos we become intimate with a carnal consumption of reality by way of painting: her images cannibalize knowledge in order to retain it. The figures in Silence and Borders— which Kovalcikova started to paint in 2009—are inspired by the artist’s intimate friendships at the time, and continue to echo that closeness. Shadows and shading are deployed on the canvas to conjure a space in which the legibility of the characters’ postures and moods is resilient even when mutable. Placed in conversation for the first time in the context of A Lover’s Discourse , Kovalcikova and EXPORT share an interest in confronting and understanding the boundaries of provocation and belonging through the empirical manifestation of their works.
Stanislava Kovalcikova in the company of VALIE EXPORT
The final presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features two new paintings by artist Stanislava Kovalcikova (b. 1988, Czechoslovakia) that she has chosen to present alongside a 1971 film by legendary video and performance artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Austria). Following her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the mentorship of Peter Doig and Tomma Abts, Kovalcikova recently initiated The White Ermine, an independent project space for contemporary art, alongside her Düsseldorf-based studio practice. Experimentation in exhibition-making and the vocabulary of display are an important part of Kovalcikova’s approach to painting: for her solo exhibition at Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2023), the artist displayed her works within a dimly lit, monochromatic atmosphere in tones of ochre, while for her solo presentation at Art Basel (also 2023), she transformed the art fair booth into the architectural environment of a waiting room, hanging her paintings inside medical cabinets. For her show at the Aspen Art Museum, Kovalcikova approaches the gallery as a cave-like environment in which the projection of VALIE EXPORT’s black-and-white film Facing a Family provides the sole source of light. Kovalcikova’s paintings are illuminated by this glow. EXPORT’s groundbreaking short piece represents an early example of interventions by artists into main- stream European television and shows a bourgeois Austrian family watchingTV together while eating dinner. Originally broadcast on Austrian network television in February 1971, Facing a Family was seen by middle-class families much like the one in the artwork itself, thereby mirroring their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, viewer, and screen. Similarly, Kovalcikova’s uncanny figures emerge from a
Guglielmo Castelli Chase Hall Ulala Imai Stanislava Kovalcikova Zeinab Saleh Issy Wood
A Lover’s Discourse is a new series of artist-led presentations introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations. Each exhibition juxtaposes recent works by an early-career artist with their choice of a companion piece from a private collection in Aspen. Artist selections range from historical to contemporary pieces, and span figurative and abstract painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, and sound.
List of works:
Stanislava Kovalcikova Silence and Borders , 2023 160 × 180 cm. Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai Stanislava Kovalcikova Train of Thought , 2024 60 × 50 cm. Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai VALIE EXPORT Facing a Family , 1971 Video (black and white, sound). 4:37 min © VALIE EXPORT, courtesy sixpackfilm
Stanislava Kovalcikova was born in Czechoslovakia in 1988 and lives and works in Düsseldorf. Recent solo exhibitions include First Rays of the New Sun , Antenna Space, Shanghai (2023); Grotto , Belvedere 21. Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2022); am I dead yet , Peres Projects, Berlin (2022); Duftmarken oder die Unfähigkeit sich mitzuteilen , sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf (2022); Imaga , 15orient, New York (2021); Eastern Promises , Open Forum, Berlin (2020); Cautionary Tales , MAMOTH, London
(2020); and Turn on Inside , Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam (2019), among others. Selected group exhibitions include Cadavre Exquis or the Voluptuous Decay of the Shivering Veril , curated by Stanislava Kovalcikova, BRAUNSFELDER, Cologne (2023); Horizons: Is there anybody out there? , curated by Robin Peckham, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2023); Hardcore , Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); Landschaft , Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne (2023); Interior , curated by Andrew Bonacina, Michael Werner Gallery, London (2022); Dark
Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truths , Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2022); Do Nothing, Feel Everything , Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2021); Queer Queer Kasimir , Saska Kepa Salon, Warsaw (2020); If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller , MAMOTH, London (2020); On the Politics of Delicacy , Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2020); Gubbinal , Project Native Informant, London (2019); and Paint, also known as Blood , Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019).
A Lover’s Discourse
March 5–April 7, 2024
Stanislava Kovalcikova in the company of VALIE EXPORT
The Goddess Inside the Machine: On the Paintings of Stanislava Kovalcikova Travis Jeppesen
There is little restraint shown—little restraint needed, to be honest, or even desired—in Stanislava Kovalcikova’s paintings, which are the cumulative eye-mind work of a fabulist visionary; one who is very well versed in and well aware of all the complicated threads and minutiae comprising the zeitgeist in which she is embedded, yet also burdened with the great gift of extension: that is, the antenna-like sensitivities needed to posit the existence of some great and consequence-rich Beyond. These paintings-cum- manifestations of a metaphysicality, invocations of a world embedded within this world, swell forth from a highly developed conscience that operates on the skittish boundaries of all temporalities: one simply cannot “locate” her language within any fixed vocabulary of either contemporaneity or classicism or modernism; hers is a restless vision that is quick to evade such meaning-heavy classifications. Instead, Kovalcikova bends toward the timeless in positing her own mythology, which is her very own variation on the Real and all the Sub-Reals that comprise it. However, the lack of restraint I identified in my first sentence should not be mistaken for a lack of discipline on the artist’s part. Kovalcikova paints slowly and with great deliberation; oftentimes one painting can take a year or even longer to complete. There is no hurried or fevered pace at work here, nor does that feeling ever come across on the canvases, either in the brushwork or the completed scenarios. Rather, the layering of imagery that has increasingly become a hallmark of her work, as manifested in the recent Silence and Borders , 2023, is the product of a very deliberate threading, proffering at once a complex tapestry that begs to be unwoven and the seduction of a polyvalent narrative, with the stains of time impinging on the actions and emotions of the present. In that painting, a darkened masculine figure squats before a naked man reclining on his elbows. Upon both their bodies, skin is trespassed:
the backside of a stilettoed nude woman seems to strut and poise her way across the torso of the latter figure, evoking some languid sultry scene of desire perhaps unfulfilled; while the obscurity of the dark figure perched above him bequeaths, upon closer inspection, the muscles and organs beneath the skin, evoking the sense of some demonic or spectral presence: perhaps the very embodiment of death. This ghastliness is accentuated by the welling up, vaporlike, of some possessed female child just above the nude man: not unlike Linda Blair’s character from The Exorcist , her face besmirched by a satanic grimace. Above her, in a sort of ether, yet another figure coalesces; and in the far right, the upper half of two muscular legs. Pulling away, we take in any number of layers, etched in a restrained palette of yellows and grays, evoking any number of scenes and memories playing out against this uncharacterizable confrontation—is it sexual? deathly? likely some combination of both—between the two men. Silences and borders, indeed: this sinister vision of rise and collapse, shaded with foreboding but also erotic possibility. Yellow and gold predominate in these latest paintings. At once the colors of life-givingness (sunshine) and wealth, all the sensate warmth of plenitude, Kovalcikova’s deployment of these colors is rich in a different sense, bringing forth a reveling in their ironic undercurrents. Train of Thought , 2024, is a close-up portrait of a young woman’s face and neck. She is wearing an expensive string of pearls, which she has lifted from her neck by her mouth—she appears to be suckling them, her lowered eyes possibly welling with tears as she savors their icy flavorlessness. The choice of shading, of definition, in her subject’s facial features gives one pause for consideration, for the most dramatic shading begins in the lower portion of the woman’s face, from her cheekbones
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
ABOUT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a thriving and globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the museum’s facility designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, the AAM enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the AAM was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and its fostering of learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the museum’s Aspen location.
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A Lover’s Discourse is curated by AAM Curator at Large Stella Bottai. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.
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