There have been debates going on for the past several years about the issue whether fashion should be considered as art. Fashion design is often blamed for its hypocrisy - for the fact that the clothing results or fashion creations cause unification, which suppresses the originality of an individual. On the other hand, fashion is considered as some kind of a statement carried on one’s own body. We are probably addressing this issue here due to the fact that the space of the Start up project in the Colloredo–Mansfeld Palace will be occupied by vests with embroidery and a video clip containing these vests by Klára Vystrčilová, instead of paintings or sculpture.
Klára started using the embroidery technique on canvas instead of the strokes of a brush. In 2012/2013 the artist produced a compact series called Black Lights which got her in the finals of the Critique Award for Young Paintings. In the summer of 2013 Klára went through a transformation in her working process - a shift from embroidery on canvas to embroidery on vests and jackets. Actually, she has been pursuing design and sewing of complicated patterns in her free time since secondary school.
The initial source of inspiration for her was the modernization of the tradition of hand embroidery from her native Slovak region and the work of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen. From the perspective of a story the embroideries represent parables about intimacy of today, interpersonal relations, gays and lesbians, and the final piece of clothing closely resembles the lavishly decorated liturgical vestments. “The front part of dress symbolizes the ostentation and greatness of faith, the embroidery on the back side represents loyalty and the attempt to come close to a person through the depiction of human figures,” Klára describes her work.
An important part of the installation Alone in Babylon is the arousing, sensualizing and mysteriously exciting video clip for the American musician DropXLife, the producer of the project The Weekend, where female innocence and erotic fantasies are encountered on the base of Klára’s vests.
Klára Vystrčilová (born 1990 in Uherské Hradiště) is a fifth year student in the Painting Studio od Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
I decided to address Nik Timková (born in 1986 in Košice), who is engaged in contemporary art in various forms, to be the curator of the supplementary exhibition. She is linked to Prague primarily through her cooperation with A.M.180 collective, or the festival Creepy Teepee for which she is creating the visual in cooperation with Jakub Hošek (under the project Gothie Disneyland). She graduated from the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London in 2011, and currently she is working on her post gradual studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Nik works with objects, collages, installations, and collaborative creation with intermediary nuance, and in her theoretical research and in the curator project Cut Club# (*2013) she works with the overlapping between contemporary art and clothing. Due to this thematic affinity of both artist (interest in the object of clothing). Nik was invited to a curator dialogue with Klára. Swedish furniture designer Pál Rödenius is a guest of a part of the exhibition led by Nik Timková which is situated in the middle room. He and Nik created a site-specific installation for Start up.
This is a first presentation of the artist within the scope of the exhibition Alone in Babylon in an environment of a public service institution in the Czech Republic.
Text by Monika Čejková
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I perceive my task of the supplementary exhibition Alone in Babylon as a sort of liquid creation, where the naively abstracted processes of the artist and the curator are directed by the material and they accelerate it to careless forms of creation. The results is some sort of a sterile seductiveness of the objects and the installation as a response to Klára’s sensualizing visualization. There is latex, concrete, fresheners, and white design sediments - a ready-made dessert of artificial nostalgia. Through my objects and the creative cooperation with the Swedish furniture designer Pál Rödenius (*1982), whose work between the viewer, the design object and the space strengthens the spatial and physical awareness of the installation, I try to find a way to provide an experience of lucid and sensual parts of the exhibition.
Text by Nik Timková
Curator:
Monika Čejková
Guest curator:
Nik Timková
Full exhibition
25/4 – 25/5 2014, Prague City Gallery, Prague – Czech Rep.