Claudie Hlavatá: Do you remember that too?

Klaudie Hlavatá was born in 1992. In 1999, a French group of Tiqqun authors published Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. In the Czech Republic, a Theory of the Young-Girl has been the focus of philosopher and theoretician Václav Janoščík. The iconized young-girl has metaphorized from an emancipating “carefree spring flower” during late Capitalism into an extremely sought-after commodity – a target group of sellers – and a hegemonistic sales tool. Klaudie Hlavatá seems to depict the sensed internal melancholy hidden behind this modern iconography. The contemporaneity and depth of her artwork seems to be briefly characterized by the fact that she created two Facebook profiles as part of the virtual dialog with her own physicality to point out both identities on her digital collages.

The body of the young-girl, although already rather liberated, is in the spastic pose of an Instagram model. What determines her physical consciousness? Is it the physical reality or the two-dimensional virtual collage?

Klaudie Hlavatá’s exhibition perfectly fits the natural potential of the gallery for intimate presentations of drawings and paintings. Although Klaudie Hlavatá’s artworks are on a classical two-dimensional medium, their installation in the gallery space directly confronts viewers with their physicality. Klaudie lets viewers examine the painting layers and search in the tangle of limbs. The artificial colorfulness and extra body parts make us check our own body. Whose arm is this? Yesterday I had only two arms… Or not? Do you remember that too?

Šárka Koudelová

Klaudie Hlavatá was born in 1992. She graduated from Vladimír Skrepl’s Studio of Painting 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During 2015 – 2016, she was an intern in Jiří David’s Studio of Intermedia Confrontation at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Her artworks examine the current context of figuration through painting and classical and digital collages.