LENKA VÍTKOVÁ / "AŤ JE TO COKOLIV, MÁ TO SVÉ POŽADAVKY"

June 9th 2011 – June 26th 2011 GALLERY CUBE MEETFACTORY What ever it is, it has its demands Exhibiting artist: Lenka Vítková Curators: Jiří Ptáček, Dušan Zahoranský Opening June 9th 2011 at 6p.m. The two essential features of Lenka Vítková's creative expression – painting and linguistic – are apparent in her parallel work on deliberate cycles of pictures and quickly realized textual installations. And despite the distance that the artist maintains between the two, it can be argued that one couldn't exist without the other. When Lenka Vítková writes or, rather, reworks her earlier insights, she disrupts the fluidness of poetic narration so readers are left with the experience of a "seam". Her texts are collages, not just for their explicit division and the interplay of association, but also for their incursions into the darkest webs of spatiotemporal narration. Vítková induces vertigo in readers through the linguistic articulation of relatively commonplace reality, not by employing radically experimental language, but rather by bending conventions.   Her approach to painting is similar. The works she has just completed for her Whatever It Is, It Has Its Demands exhibition are a mature example of her attempts to "bend" the traditional syntax of the painting lexicon. While the paintings are mainly abstract, a significant minority are objective. The majority of the paintings could easily be described as "imaginative" if the objective works were not so thematically material and expressively concise.  But then this is exactly what Vítková is up to. The object from one painting is reflected in another, albeit a reflection reduced to a mere shape. The process of painting is fundamentally tied to the emergence of form and the discovery of its expression. This is artistic contemplation, and one needn't be a painter to understand. Vítková intentionally works on the borders of spot, form and object, and the artist lets these become one thing on the canvas on one occasion, something else on another.   Or another example: when Vítková crosses out a painting with a spontaneous gesture, she then corrects her brushstrokes at the ends to impart something controlled or even filigree to the impulsiveness. The effect is disturbing, though the viewer might not even be able say why. Lenka Vítková's paintings are typically compositions of designated and additional (undesignated) perturbing elements that are homoeopathically placed into familiar, for some of us even profaned, creative frameworks. There is a reason for this: the disturbance isn't provocation by the "invisible," but rather an attempt to reassert the urgency of the most mundane phenomena. Using one more analogy from the field of verbal communication, Vítková's paintings endeavour to provide a sincere response to the trite yet horrifying question "How are you?" Jiří Ptáček Translation: David Gaul MeetFactory – International center of contemporary artPlatform for meeting of the arts and creative groups. In the former factory run gallery spaces, theater, music, film club, studios, library and resident studios. MeetFactory is supported by the capital city of Prague.