Marian Palla / the little infinity
21.02.2024 - 04.05.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curators: Denisa Kujelová a Vít Havránek
Opening: 21st February, 7 pm
To create a picture using earth from a Moravian orchard is to abandon the modernist tradition of expressionism, fauvism, impressionism, and also what preceded them. For someone who doesn't paint every day, such a decision may seem easy. But it isn’t, as both the painter and the picture lose the joy of a brush sweeping across the palette and canvas, as well as the effects conveyed by colour. For curators and the visitors, the earth pictures, one of which gave the exhibition its title, are a gateway to the most extensive display of Marian Palla's work to date. We enter Palla's oeuvre from roughly the centre of its material sediment, literally crashing, like country schoolmasters, into the middle of a giant molehill. Because, in keeping with the artist's programme, this is neither a complete nor a scholarly retrospective but typically, or occasionally, a taxonomic (exploring the species diversity of the artefacts) and random show.
Palla's very first participation in a public presentation of young Brno artists (1971) grabbed the attention of Jiří Valoch, for whom the Nature picture was "something different at first sight".[1]. This event led to their acquaintance and Palla became an active member and a driving force behind the now-legendary[2] Brno circle. His studio in Kotlářská Street provided the space for countless meetings, debates, studio exhibitions and performances by invited guests. The distinctiveness that had enchanted Valoch was not only visible against the backdrop of the conformist art of the time, it also characterised Palla's work within the Brno circle. It centred around two opposites, seriousness resulting from the experience of land art and drawing performances (I existed in this painting for two days and ate 7,799 grains of rice, 24 hours, Journey to a touch, Drawings with tea, etc.), and humour, or more precisely, naivety, constantly present from the earliest paintings (My parents, Nature, etc.).
Palla actually describes himself as a naive conceptualist.[3] The starting point for this conceptualism was not Duchamp nor his idiosyncratic interpreter Kossuth, but rather Magritte's painting This is not a pipe. The language, idea and definition of art around which the interest of Anglo-American conceptual artists gravitates has its roots in Palla’s work in fiction, poetry, and increasingly in Zen spirituality. Humour, naivety, self-criticism, empirical observation, description of obvious facts, absurd questions, paradoxes, the great subjects of the philosophy of life. We find all this condensed in every single one of Palla's poems, objects, pictures which are created because the artist wants to "experience intensely" but at the same time "to do things without purpose". Art and Zen practice mutually intertwine.
The concept of abandoning modernity mentioned in the introduction (with the exception of conceptual art) was employed by the artist to move through the history that far predates it. He could view the manifestations of the zeitgeist and modernity with the hearty kindness of a caveman, and painting with sticks or body parts, Neolithic pottery, imprinting and other prehistoric practices hold a prominent place in his work. Perhaps due to his pre-modern perspective, his work naturally constituted itself from the positions of interspeciesism and radical sustainability topical today. He arrived at it not by reading Bruno Latour but through a concentrated meditation on the reality that surrounds him.
For that matter, even the essay Against Interpretation[4] relevant today draws attention to the simplification (undoubtedly related to conceptual art) committed by art theory when it forgets the qualities that arise in primary sensory perception and assesses the value of an artwork only through interpretation. Sontag notes the "experience of something mystical, magical" that the prehistoric creature had in the Lascaux cave. Palla's conceptualism was aware of the brain's one-sidedness and involved body parts and nature in creating art. Projecting the ideal of enchantment into a remote French cave, as the New York theorist did, was not an option for Palla; in contrast, he demonstrates that it can be experienced by anyone in their surroundings. In his case, also between cities, Brno, a country house with a yard and animals, and cosmic nature.
[1] VALOCH, Jiří. Marian Palla: Ticho, čekání a dech (kat. výst.). Galerie Na bidýlku, Brno, December 1987.
[2] Let us note here the publications and exhibitions of Barbora Klímová, long-term research of Jana Písaříková and Ondřej Chrobák of the Jiří Valoch Archive in the MG in Brno, the similarly focused research of Helena Musilová, the catalogues of the works of Vladimír Ambroz (Tomáš Pospiszyl), ČS koncept 70. let by Denisa Kujelová (ed.), Akční umění by Pavlína Morganová, etc.
[3] Marian Palla, Naivní konceptualista a slepice,2014.
[4] Susan Sontag, „Against Interpretation." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 1966.
Veronika Vlková / Daddy_rough_and _reduced_final_ok
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Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Marie Štindlová
Opening: 19 October 2022, 7 pm
Mother and son are travelling on foot to Vienna. On the way they cook, wash, look, show each other things. Sometimes it's difficult, their hands are of stone. The steps are verses and the march is a prayer for healthy relationships. Without losing their humour, they are trying to shake off the layers of patriarchal sediment settled on their arms, hearts, family and landscape.
The title of the exhibition Daddy_rough_and_reduced_final_ok refers in its form and structure to the names of documents stored in the digital environment in a number of variants (rough/final, reduced/hd etc.). Video is therefore the central element of the exhibition. The thematization of the medium and its structure (its disruption) is reflected in the way the artist approaches it. She works with ruptures and distortions which she uses to create similar cracks in stereotypical notions of clearly defined gender roles. She explores them both gently and with a mischievous smile. At the same time, however, she looks with utter seriousness for ways of how to heal patriarchy and masculinity in our time.
The film shows the artist and her teenage son navigating a landscape associated with a family and historical trauma. By experiencing the landscape together and performing certain activities, they seek to heal it, as well as themselves. They encode a desire for renewal and transformation into ordinary gestures of survival and care. The process is complicated by the stone structures embedded in their bodies which make quick movements, fine motoric skills and mutual touching impossible. The pilgrims are hoping that with every kilometre they will leave behind a past that may no longer be part of them, that the stones on their hands will turn to clay and water and they will be able to knead them into different shapes: soft, pliable, yet firm.
Cooking their favourite food, mother and son feed the surrounding gorges. Flowers are guides, together with the son they tell the story of the search for his role. The stream bubbles up and washes away everything unnecessary.
Acknowledgement / Collaboration:
Photography: Maria Lopatyuk, Matěj Nytra, Katarina Kadijević
Sound: Jonatan Pastirčák, Tomáš Dvořák, Kateřina Koutná
Costumes: Kristýna Nytrová
Exhibition design: Martin Nytra
Kanikuly march: Lucie Králíková, Hana Kubešová
