‘Arteria’ by Kateřina Vincourová at American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Artery is a blood vessel that distributes blood high in oxygen from the heart to all parts of the body. A major route of life and love. It sounds poetic to name an exhibition after it, suggesting a stream (of physical matter or thoughts), a network of interconnected principles, which is both vital and potent. However, let’s not forget that arteries are also spheres where conflicting and unhealthy contemporary lifestyles are embodied, clogging the flow and leading to disease and deterioration. The human body is a perfect, but nowadays also highly polluted system, just as the larger environment it inhabits. When blood cannot flow smoothly through just a tiny path of the micro- and macrocosmic mesh of living matter, human and interspecies relationships, natural and artificial systems, the lack of oxygen can cause the entire apparatus to collapse. At least for those who need to breathe…
Kateřina Vincourová’s work reveals its connection with the poetics of the human body and its immediate surroundings at the first glance. Fleshly colors, bone-like structures, body parts and the ephemera surrounding them create fragile yet monumental compositions, which will rarely go all the way to abstraction. Vincourová fragments her motifs into seemingly isolated parts of a highly sophisticated vocabulary, where a hand is placed too far to be able to reach out for a comb and attempt to brush the viewer’s hair. However, the tension thus created might become stronger than actual touch. The aesthetically pleased and slightly disturbed viewer may begin discovering the somewhat sneaky invisible wires between all the exhibited pieces, which will quietly yet persistently attempt to wrap her inside the artist’s imaginative web. The vessels begin to squeeze and the blood flow slows down. Breathing becomes harder.
Throughout her entire practice, Vincourová has addressed now “hot” topics of ecology, consumption, femininity, domesticity, the (im)possibilities of communication, or artificiality. Her recent works, creating the present exhibition, are no less critical in such respects than their predecessors from the late nineties and onwards. Today, however, the artist’s language has faintly transformed in order to discuss the complexities and double-sidedness of these issues in most contemporary terms. The artist recalls that what is being sold to us as a flawless system is rotting from the inside. A wannabe perfect body, a wannabe perfect world keeps on failing to hide the trouble we find ourselves in. We can keep looking on the bright side only until the oxygen still flows.
Karina Kottová
Imprint
| Artist | Kateřina Vincourová |
| Exhibition | Arteria |
| Place / venue | American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C. |
| Dates | 27 January – 11 March 2018 |
| Curated by | Karina Kottová |
| Photos | Lee Stalsworth |
| Website | www.american.edu/cas/museum/ |
| Index | American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Karina Kottová Kateřina Vincourová |