Alena Kotzmannová & Q:
The Last Trace & Seconds Before…
Fait Gallery MEM
17. 10. 2018 – 12. 1. 2019
Opening: 17. 10. 2018, 7 p.m.
Curator: Jiří Ptáček
The exhibitions of Alena Kotzmannová and Q: (artistic pseudonym of Igor Korpaczewski) introduce two artists of the middle generation. In the Fait Gallery they are unconventionally presented in the form of two solo shows sharing the format and subject, while the actual linking of both exhibitions only occurs once, through Alena Kotzmannová’s object intervention into her neighbour’s display.
Alena Kotzmannová showcases a series of photographic diptychs in which she combines landscape with photographs of luxury footwear and fashion accessories. She created a vision of the decline of the human civilization and archaeology of its relics. “The figure of the last human walking through a desert with a camera can be equally well replaced with the image of an automaton which, long after the disappearance of its creators, is still running its programme, mechanically sorting out its finds for a museum that nobody will ever visit,” comments exhibition curator Jiří Ptáček.
While Kotzmannová displays her works on a bridge spanning the whole space of the Fait Gallery, Q: placed his monumental object and a diorama in the ground-floor area of MEM. Like Kotzmannová’s, his works are also clearly related to the subject of an impending catastrophe and critically polemicize with futile hopes for a possible escape before it (and from Planet Earth). “The eight-metre model of a rescue spaceship , an ark for the 21st century, and the diorama with a desperate family of astro-settlers are paradoxically intended as suggestive sensory experiences, fascinating last images on the collective retina of mankind.“
The curator explains the unconventional division of the exhibition by the need to give free reign to the different temperaments of the artists. Kotzmannova’s work is characterised by elegiac nature, melancholy and introversion, while Q: approaches the subject with extroversion and critical emphasis on the ethical dimension of our relationship with the place on which our existence depends.
Visual artist and musician Igor Korpaczewski uses the Q: pseudonym exclusively for his “non-painterly realisations” (where he presents himself as KW, i.e. under another derivate from his surname). His first solo exhibitions took place in the first half of the 1990s, for example, in the U Řečických Gallery (1993) and the JNJ Gallery (1996), now non-existent but in their time progressive Prague galleries of contemporary art. These were followed by exhibitions in the Václav Špála Gallery, Prague (2001), the Brno Gallery (2006), Prague’s MeetFactory and the Dole Gallery, Ostrava (both 2008), in the Drdova Gallery, Prague (2013), the Blansko Municipal Gallery (2014), the Kolín Municipal Gallery and the Měsíc ve dne Gallery in České Budějovice (both 2017). The artist had his largest show in Brno in 2011, together with photographer Markéta Othová, in the House of the Lords of Kunštát of the Brno House of Arts. By coincidence, Igor Korpaczewski’s exhibition in the Fait Gallery follows Othová’s show staged there before the summer break.
Alena Kotzmannová (*1974), a visual artist specialising in photography, returns to the Fait Gallery six years after her joint exhibition with Jan Šerých launching the gallery’s activities, then in its original venue in the former malt-house of the Královo Pole brewery. In the following years she had solo shows in Plataforma Revólver, Lisbon (2013), the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace of the Prague City Gallery (2016) and displayed her work at a number of group exhibitions. Her last show in her “home” hunt kastner gallery in Prague was held in 2014. She invited performer William Hunt to join the exhibition; six years before, she conceived her exhibition in the same gallery as a dialogue between her photographs and texts by Lenka Vítková. In the light of her joint exhibitions with David Böhm (2008 and 2011) and Martin Vančát (2008), her show with Q: in the Fait Gallery is a continuation of a specific series of projects in which Alena Kotzmannová explores the possibilities of collaboration with other artists.
The exhibition opening was held on Wednesday 17 October 2018 at 7 p.m.
Photographic reproductions for the exhibition can be downloaded here: https://bit.ly/2CqBOCN
Media contact:
Lucie Domorádová
domoradova@faitgallery.com
+420 601 327 215
www.faitgallery.com