The exhibition of Lenka Vítková Slope is a story and a journey between language and image. Although the series of paintings resembles sequence, and adjacent poem has somehow the character of a letter from a journey, both disturbs those determinations in their common relation and with constant curves towards the other, the image making capacity of language and narrativity of painting as much as the journey’s destination and the addressed but imagined reader of the text. Vítková does so with typically silent cheerfulness, civil, almost earthy humbleness in personal and intimate expression that is however fulfilled with expressive and emotional colour scale.
As much as in her previous work, those designations are related to the earth, the firm ground under our feet, being a base but also a limit, our horizon, but also the gravity. Going beyond it, directing to something, the movement, growth but also walk is then a certain metaphor of life. This symbolics transcends into the title of the exhibition, but also in the paintings, bushes growing in the slope, the sky above our head, and the lake below us. Similarly in the tension between the simplicity of the expression and somehow its core catching of things on the limits of abstraction. But also in the technology itself, when Vítková use her own yolk based paints providing the mat density as of the natural pigments like red ochre, graphite or vermilion.
Despite that, the work is not realistic, materialistic nor prosaic, but always transcends into the poetical. The contours of the bushes in the evening sun, wind in the back and moving skirt folds, as much as Lenka’s gentle smile are always addressed to someone, although with uncertain existence and properties. As Lenka writes “I imagine the answer”.
Michal Novotný
Imprint
| Artist | Lenká Vítková |
| Exhibition | Slope |
| Place / venue | Centre for Contemporary Art Futura, Prague |
| Dates | June 29 - September 16, 2018 |
| Curated by | Michal Novotný |
| Website | www.futuraproject.cz/en/karlin-studios |
| Index | FUTURA Lenká Vítková Michal Novotný |