Veronika Holcová

Homo Spiritualis

04.12.2015-31.01.2016

The opening: 04.12.2015, time: 18.00

Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia 1

Jaskółcza 1, Gdańsk – Dolne Miasto

curator: dr Agnieszka Wołodźko

 

Despite the neighborhood of our countries, Czech art is not and often guest in the Polish exhibition showrooms. This time, the CCA Łaźnia presents paintings of prominent Prague painter - Veronica Holcová.

People who feel glut of reduced language of conceptual art will be able to take a breath at this exhibition. Aesthetic satisfaction is guaranteed. However, the values contained in the work of Czech artist are not limited only to this layer. The content is equally important. Those, who in turn are under the impression that contemporary art is stuck for good in the area of rationality, will also be surprised. Veronika Holcová refers to dreams, premonitions and symbols drawn from many cultures. Characters in her paintings are symbiotically linked with the landscape, "non-human" beings - plants, minerals, animals - coexist with humans. Nature is imbued with spirituality.  Subconscious plays a significant role in the reading of the reality proposed by the painter.

 

Holcová admits to being inspired by Symbolists’ painting. Exhibition Mysterious Distances. Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914 organized this summer in Prague monastery of St. Agnes presented this interesting and extremely significant for the Czech cultural identity style. It reminded artists expressing in this style, for example, Alfons Mucha, Max Švabinský, František Bílek, Josef Váchal, Bohumil Kubišta, Jan Zrzavý and others – they knowingly placed themselves in the opposition to contemporary for them rapid technological development, industrialization and accompanying realm of idea  - rationalization. Manifesting their critical attitude towards the surrounding reality they decided that their art would represent what was elusive, individual, spiritual, and not dependent on a rational analysis.

Currently, the progress of technicality of life takes place in an incomparably faster pace than a hundred years ago. However, concerns related to it remain the same. How to defend own subjectivity in the age of digitization and facing reality, to a large extent subordinated to the processes proposed by machines? How, in these conditions, to protect what is personal, spiritual and elusive by intellect? And, finally, what is the value of dreams on today’s era?

 

New York-based art historian Jonathan Crary, in his book 24/7. Late capitalism and the end of the dream, which has just appeared in Polish translation, writes about the dream as a phenomenon that is intensely politically charged and not adequate to the requirements of global capitalism. The author points out that today, there is a tendency to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Dream, therefore, is seen as time wasted, because it is unproductive. What's more, emerging during sleep dreams relate to something other than raising capital. Hence, this is an area to which we refer with suspicion.

 

Dream is an area intensively explored by Veronica Holcová. In case of her work, one can talk about the ecology of the imagination, in the sense that it is an attempt to restore the importance of the spiritual content, premonitions and dreams. Artist herself likes to explore own psychic abilities: the imaginary motifs of her paintings sometimes find their counterpart in the real world.

 

Veronika Holcová – born in 1973 in Prague. Since 2015 she lives in Ottawa. In years 1993-2000 she studied drawing, painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad. Her works are in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague, in private and public collections in the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the UK and the United States.