Dorota Sadovská: Mimetic Crisis

The opening on March 3, 2020, from 6 pm. The exhibition until June 13, 2020.
curator: Lenka Sýkorová
photo: Dorota Sadovská, Markéta Bendová

Dorota Sadovská constantly develops and reflects current forms of art. She examines the installation possibilities of a hanging painting, drawing and digital photograph. Her artwork consciously expands into space. The exhibition for the Altán Klamovka Gallery presents her latest series entitled Wounded Canvases, which is created as a site-specific object using the cut paper technique on canvas. The artist works with minimized means of expression and the human body purged of layers foisted on it by our civilization; all this in the context of the current mimetic crisis against the backdrop of the development of post-conceptual drawing and the fluidity of the times that blur the line between individual art techniques. The artist exploits the spatial possibilities of a frame and a stretched canvas that is cut into and wounded by the drawing lines. In its entirety, the uniqueness of these lines creates an imprint of our civilization. In the gestures, we can recognize Sadovská’s older artwork with references to the paintings of the saints but with a greater sense of space. Using a bright yellow base color, the artist exploits the principle of translucency and takes the drawing lines from the surface into space. The resulting canvases, folded into an object in the size of a human figure, visually make the viewer to closely examine them. In detail, they reveal universal, yet deeply human gestures, in the form of the precise anatomical drawing of the figure. She also uses the sculptural technique of a relief and three-dimensional objects. It is this variability of painting, sculpture or drawing that the artist examines, while reflecting on the contemporary mimetic game that we all experience every day in the flood of images both in a public space and in an Internet space in our mobile phones or laptops, which often presents us with a misleading reality of the human body.

Dorota Sadovská is a well-established Slovak artist of the middle generation. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France. Her artwork freely moves between the media of painting, drawing, photograph, performance and interaction with viewers. Above all, she is a painter who consciously works with respect for painting in the context of art history. She focuses on the human body that she sees from two angles, as a substance and as a bearer of gestures and emotions. Playing with the perspective and an unusual angle of portrayal is another level of interpretation of her artwork.

Lenka Sýkorová

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