SECOND ARCHIVE
Lucia Tallová (1985) has for several years been among the most distinctive figures of the Slovak visual art scene. She is known for her painterly individuality, her characteristic motif of sentimental landscape, her monochromatic palette, and her precise painting technique.
The Second Archive builds naturally upon her previous exhibition projects Before the Beginning, After the End, Archive of Fictional Memories, and House on the Cliff, in which the artist interweaves the classical medium of painting with spatial installations, objects, collages, and photographs, thereby creating both conceptual and material connections among her evolving themes and techniques. Her practice increasingly extends into three-dimensional space; although painting remains omnipresent and dominant, it at times recedes into an intuitive gesture.
The exhibition refers especially to her project Archive of Fictional Memories, presented in the Stupava Synagogue (2016), where Tallová developed the theme of the archive as a site-specific spatial installation composed of wooden shelves and cabinets inhabited by collages, objects, paintings, old photographs, and albums through which she re-told fictional stories of anonymous individuals. The Second Archive continues this project not only thematically but also visually: the artist focuses on “inhabiting” the gallery space with objects, furniture, and museum vitrines that evoke fragments of old archives, depositories, and cabinets of curiosities, complemented by a collection of personal diaries, sketches, and photographs.
The theme of the personal archive also connects to the artist’s passion for collecting and gathering old photographs, albums, postcards, porcelain, stones, and various bizarre objects and pieces of furniture—objets trouvés that she subsequently manipulates and transforms. These become her working material and tools, underscored by the layering and repetition of her characteristic motifs and symbols: streaks of black ink, diluted pools of color, drifting particles of dust and smoke, blurred horizons, ribbons, or flowers as potent symbols of femininity, nostalgia, and sentiment. The woman becomes the central motif in the re-narration of black-and-white photographs. This time, Tallová also focuses on photographic flaws—blurred or distorted images, poor compositions, mistakes and accidents occurring during development, as well as the effects of time and the patina of photographic paper—elements she actively seeks out, conceals, and transforms through painting and collage.
The exhibition offers not only the artist’s newest works but also an intimate glimpse into her personal collections, memories, and archives, revealing her working methods and thought processes. Tallová opens the door to her studio—a space where she creates, transforms, gathers, layers, multiplies, archives, and searches. She responds to older works on paper and canvas, engaging with themes of loss, forgetting, and erasure—processes closely linked to memory and to the stories, real or imagined, that comprise her archives.
In her latest installations and objects, Tallová uses her old ink drawings and watercolor paintings as raw material—cutting, folding, and pasting them into collages. Works that were never previously exhibited, long held within sketchbooks or the depths of her studio, thus receive a “second life.” Certain segments of the exhibition reference automatic drawing, a kind of circling back, a re-telling of older works and stories in a metaphorical sense. The driving principles of the exhibition are cyclical repetition, intuitive collecting and arranging, and the artist’s direct engagement with the gallery space, its architecture, and the visitor’s movement through it. Objects and furniture occupy the exhibition space through a carefully considered scenography that resonates with the character of the gallery’s historic rooms, together creating a unified atmospheric environment in which the past dissolves into the present.
GALLERY MEDIUM
Bratislava, Slovakia
Curated by Zuzana Pacaková
7. December 2017 – 10. January 2018