SWAMP — Monika Čejková

SWAMP

30/8–1/9 2019, Berlínskej model, Prague – Czech Rep.

Exhibiting Artists:
Nigin Beck, Michele Gabriele, Nadira Husain, Wolfgang Matuschek, Jaroslav Panuška, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Timo Seber

Curator:
Monika Čejková

Photos:
Tomáš Souček

Exhibition view on Contemporary Art Daily, Artviewer, Tzvetnik, Hugo Zorn, AQNB

From: Monika Čejková
Date: Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 2:01 PM
Subject: text FOAF
To: Nigin Beck, Michele Gabriele, Galerie Tobias Naehring, Katarzyna Przezwanska, Wolfgang Matuschek

Dear gang,
I’m sending you the concept for the exhibition SWAMP at Berlinskej Model:
In working on putting together this show, I drew on the way symbols and metaphors are used in contemporary art.

Timo Seber’s works depicting two skeletons became its point of initiation. Their elongated limbs form a continuous rectangle framing and delimiting an abstract shape hidden inside. An unspecified symbol, perhaps something from a parallel world, levitates in a closed space. These skeletons reminded me of figures from the paintings of the Czech, symbolistically decadent painter Jaroslav Panuška, which date from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

Back then, Jaroslav Panuška concerned himself with dark visions and his use of the fantastic injected new imagination into Czech art. He found the well of inspiration for his subjects in the world of macabre folk tales – water goblins, vampires, hanged and drowned figures and other similar monstrous beings, confirming that behind the sun-drenched world of daylight there also lies a darker, lunar world. Dreamlike or lucid visions in which these beings become superior to humans and adopt an ambivalent stance towards them. For me, Panuška primarily represents the overarching visual emblem of this exhibition, even though in some cases he also comes close in terms of subject matter. His work will be represented at the show by the painting Upír (Vampire) dating from approx. 1900.

I then tried to select artworks from each one of you that work together, mutually creating a certain visual parable and combining work with symbols – these may belong to particular national or ethnic groups, religions, or they may be ob- jects from personal narratives, storytelling, black and socially-critical humour, metaphors of the comical and grotesque, or obsessive visions. They are artworks based on mystery which act upon the viewer with the enchanting magic of the arcane worlds of parables, legends and ballads.

And now my request: Could each one of you send me a short artist’s statement regarding your artwork at the show and send me an image of the artwork?

Thanks! Monika
Full exhibition text.