In the new series I created two lines of work – large-format carved wooden images and etchings on copper plates. In the "wooden" series, I continued to work with a solid base material, which I had shown for the first time last year at the solo exhibition I'll cry whenever I feel like it at the Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava. I transferred the figurative motifs onto a wooden plywood, which naturally resists me more. The result is ten larger formats with a more relaxed drawing style transitioning into painting processes. The advantage of the chosen material is also the possibility of cutting into it, which creates a significant multimedia hybrid combining dynamic drawings with printmaking techniques.
Until now, I have built my visual narratives on defined and bounded formats. In my new works, I disrupt the tradition of artifacts and conceptually try to get out of the pressure of commodification of art. I cut out individual figurative drawings from the plywood boards and placed them on the walls in a complex environment. I was also inspired by forms of stickers or children's insert puzzles. I also used a slightly ironic installation with the symbolism of playful, cute, but fragile and ephemeral butterflies in the new series of copper plates. I supplemented the eighteen etched matrices in their raw form with drawing entries, temporary tattoos and my daughter's stickers and placed them on copper rods in the space.
Thematically, I reflect on the identity crisis of the generation of millennials, today mostly 30-year-olds, to which I myself belong. Millennials find themselves in a unique set of social and economic factors and circumstances: precarious work, delayed births, increasing loneliness, a hotter planet, unstable and unaffordable housing, the disappearance of the automatic career progression that existed here for decades.
Photo credit @isonative.
Creation of the works has been supported in the form of scholarship using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council.
