Silvia Krivošíková: Man, Don´t Get Angry!

About

Silvia Krivošíková derives her visual expression from herself and from lived life experiences. Her art is about the relationship between (wo)man and the world, in which she derives her value range of painting themes. The fixation on the self can be indefinite. The "I" is (in literary as well as visual art) the recognition of the self through the dialogical projection of the depicted person, one's own opposition, the figure. As it turns out, this principle is a way of dissolving and solving problems (artistic puzzles as well as individual mental small wins). This process is typical for the art of Romanticism, the second half of 19th Century, but also a part of early modernism, also for the postmodern period constantly rewriting the principles of modernity - to interpret the world subjectivistically, i.e. to point to one's own perception of the world. Although the author draws on her own experience, the result is fiction, fictional world. After all, for centuries there has been visual art as well as literature (from the Bible through major novels) based on a fragmentary reality culminating in a total fiction of characters and relationships that is so appealing, so close to the individual, and that we have been following for centuries, that we perceive it as ever-present, literally as fact, because the main psychological moment of our beliefs is identification or empathy (an important aesthetic category that built the history of art in the 20th century). It is important to say, that one is working with the emotions/feelings of both the artist and the audience. It is a transfer of the artist's ideas processed into visual form in a way that is acceptable to the perceiver. In every such work, there is a principle present that is able to reflect the content with an intense narrative value. Often the subjective experience of the artist is so compelling, visually detabulating social themes (confession of failure, self-examination, economic deprivation, love, remembering and idealizing the environment we grew up in, personal dilemma, traumatic birth, leaving, unplanned nomadism, change of social environment from active to very isolated, as well as trying to portray the metaphor of happiness). It is not just a matter of expressing mental images, of groping and recognizing them. Silvia Krivošíková adds humour, hyperbole, an admission of failure to the meaning (this is an important moment in the shift from the art of Symbolism, Expressionism and other art defined as capturing emotional meanings). Humour and exaggeration can also be built up in artworks depicting idyllic landscapes - visually, the character of the painting is a melancholic memory of a place sounds touristic and exotic, realistically capturing the place in central Slovakia where she grew up. Here she is not constructing a narrative of a national, intact, highly idealized place as a preserved open-air museum, but a narrative (sic!) of sentimentality, which includes distance and detachment, hence also wit, and a bit of wry commentary on the efforts of an ostalgic, suburban place and its inhabitants to approach tourist marketing with a rural mind. A place with all the flaws, magical realism, now a dream paradise.

The visual component of Silvia Krivošíkova's work is heavily based on the grace of colour and the importance of colour as a fundamental painting medium. She uses the complementarity of colours to create colour contrast, giving colour a dialectical quality of meaning. She works with tonal hue of color fields, which she uses to fragment paintings into constructed fragments.

The visuality of the works is figurative, abstract, sometimes on the borderline between depicting a figure and encoding it in an abstract structure - obscuring it. Abstraction as well as depiction at the intersection of figure and abstraction allows the artist a great deal of improvisation in her painting. It can be seen that many of the works are created by searching for the form and figure, the scene itself, directly on the canvas - by making so-called creatio (without photographic, meticulously drawn preparations), some are based on quick sketches. The repetition and seriality of some themes and fragments in the works uses the principle of film, framed by the same format. It is a flow of ideas as well as a play with colour and form that allows the use of a visual arsenal already made available by the interwar avant-gardes, viewing the image as a free field of liberal visual "building" as well as of possible pictorial "destruction" - the decomposition of the image. In the artist's case, this is not to be interpreted paradoxically or militaristically; it is a game and an enjoyment of the game. It is better to notice in which abstract image we can decipher the figure emerging from the graphic elements. The artist is not testing the viewer and his ability to associate and connect visual forms. It is about her own play, freedom, liberty.

An important basis of the work is the material, we meet here with painterly cardboard, drawing on paper, scattered object forms in the form of relief or object as if they had "fallen out of the picture" into space and anchored their physical form from cardboard. This dialogue between the spatial object and the two-dimensional painting is one of the basic communicative principles with the subject world, with reality. It also echoes the intuitive principle of the human brain and its ability to solve the "paper" puzzle game as a puzzle (spatial perception). It is a proxy for the principle of "trial and error", "play and chance" of complementary principles/paradoxes that constantly recur in the author's work.

Krivošíková often intervenes in her works with texts with new forms of Slovak-Germanish fictional language. She often uses idioms of meaning logical only in certain languages, her household is multilingual. Idioms are often imaginative, and she exploits this potential of languages. "Man, Don't Get Angry!" (Mensch ärgere Dich nicht) is a proverb, also a parlor game. The playful multiplicity is also hidden in the title of the exhibition.

Silvia Krivošíková (1976) was born in Zvolen (SR), studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (one year Dep. of Glass Assoc. prof. J. Gavula, other years studio K.R.E.S.B.A. prof. V. Popovič, where she completed her studies in 2004), in 2003 at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto, Portugal (prof. P. Tudela). From 2003 to 2011 she lived in Portugal, since December 2011 she lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Her first book monograph on her artworks was published in 2019.

Public Guided Tour: 13th July 2021 (Tuesday) at 17:00
27th August 2021 (Friday) at 17:00

Supported with public funding by Bratislava selfgoverning region