Michal Škoda / Interweaving
22.05.2024 - 27.07.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Silvia L. Čúzyová
Opening: 22nd May, 7 pm
Michal Škoda's representative exhibition entitled INTERWEAVING is not a retrospective but thematizes a constant creative dialogue with the past, present and the possible future of his work - a continuous intertwining of subjects, meanings, media and materials. It is also a continuation of a focused interaction with Places with Specific Qualities. Škoda consistently works with a reduced abstract form and realises his subjects – an interest in space and architecture, a place for the human, archiving of existence and everyday life - through a variety of techniques. Drawing is one of the main means of expression in his work, along with artist’s books, and in recent years his sculptural nature has re-emerged in objects that work, to some extent, with architectural morphology. While the large-scale drawings and objects are essential and highly abstracted works, their imaginary counterparts involve Škoda's diaries and so-called Records, where he maps his everyday life through immediate drawing and photographic records. It is literally an archive of the artist's existence where countless stimuli take place, even those seemingly different from what he represents.
Diaries and Records are two series from Škoda's rich output in the field of artist’s books developed since the 1990s. Diaries represent a more traditional form of hand-bound notebooks with classic pagination. Each exists in a single copy. They have a chronological character and are numbered according to the order of their creation. The extensive collection of diaries is based on original black and white photography with artistic interventions in various techniques. Photography appeared in Škoda's work in 1996 as part of his first book, Places. Over the following decades its form matured and evolved through a multitude of visualizations and photographic records. The textual component is absent in the diaries and it is not clear whether it is possible to "read" them in a linear way. However, they clearly show what interests the artist, what catches his eye and engages his mind. The diaries are the artist's private field of experimentation, a reservoir of inspiration and ideas. The images follow one by one as if from a dictionary of Škoda's perception: structures and grids, found architectural situations, details, accents, horizons and vistas - inconspicuous but formative moments of existence, subtle contemplative beauty. The artist's ability to generate image after image in flawless composition is fascinating. The positioning of images on the pages is highly important, and perforations appear as physical intersections into the world of the following pages.
Records, as Michal Škoda calls his mixed-media drawings on A4 paper, are primary messages in the simplest of ways, "continuous touches" - a dialogue with the everyday reality and the result of countless hours over a sheet of paper when concentrated work in the studio takes on meditative dimensions. Elementary visual units indicate the inner constellation of more complex images and reveal Škoda's creative process. For these records, the artist uses the techniques of drawing, pen drawing, painting and collage, adding pieces of time-relevant reality such as photographs, frottage, fragments of various printed materials, ground plans, etc. He still works with inscriptions (more precisely with words) and typographic compositions, albrot to a much lesser extent than in the past. The specific character of Records lies in the fact that the individual sheets are not bound, and can be selected and used to intervene in space, thus presenting a simple and at the same time eccentric form of an artist’s book. It was impossible to resist the distinctive character of the Fait Gallery in Brno and not to attempt a creative confrontation of a magnificent industrial space with A4 drawings and records. Hundreds of pieces of Records placed in succession, as they were created, make up a unique whole of an enormous picture and reflect Škoda's intense analysis of space and its potential, "space as a phenomenon and an infinite territory of subjects."
Habima Fuchs / Matter in Eternity
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Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Šimon Kadlčák
Opening: 21st February, 7 pm
The whirling eruptions of energy discharges created matter by combining particles, the matter grew in volume and increased in size, filled space and started to produce shapes. Shapes of all forms and sizes were created which continued to change over time. Some shapes appeared unusually unstable, ephemeral and fleeting compared to others, while others in contrast appeared static and unchanging. The truth was, however, that there were also forms compared to which the ephemeral ones seemed stable, and also those compared to which the apparently static ones seemed to be in constant motion. Humans were among the forms that manifested in the course of this process (sometimes it is incorrectly said that it was at the end of it). Like everything else, they were created by stardust, elements ejected from star nuclei coalescing into larger wholes, an expression of a cosmic consciousness that started to explore itself. It seems that conscious matter (or materialized consciousness) predominantly perceives the surrounding world through contact with other matter. Where there is contact, mutual acquainting starts. Matter both reflects and emits light. Since matter and energy are the same,[1],light has become an extended tentacle of conscious matter. It is no longer necessary to touch directly to perceive, touching can be done at a distance.
Habima Fuchs, matter exploring itself, brings into the light-flooded hall of the Fait Gallery MEM objects, arranges them, divides the space with them, places them into correlations and balances them in a concentrated manner. For her, the exhibition is an opportunity to temporarily pause and fixate the current phase of her personal exploration of the world, as well as to present a fragmentary section of it to others in the form of a spatial record. The exhibition is a moment inviting a break from the usual work routine of kneading matter into shapes full of symbolic meanings, a possibility of reflection and sharing with others. The imagery of Habima Fuchs's works abounds in distinct motifs and associations which she presents to others for free confrontation with their own contexts and subsequent interpretation. In doing so, she trusts in mutual understanding. The roots of the images she works with grow out of the shared mycelium of a "collective information archive": its conscious levels consist of the accumulations of the experience of many generations of human life passed down over millennia in the form of images, books, thoughts and feelings..., and the unconscious ones in turn involve the billions of years of experience of organic life (in forms that people can always recognise but which, given their means of communication, they are only able to express through paraphrasing).
The artist’s current constellation is typified by the geometrical division of a particular space, airiness, leaving room for exploring space through movement, as well as for interpretation. The individually positioned elements create "neural nodes", local clusters of artefacts that determine the final possibilities of the audience's movement through the space. It is the relations of objects in space and its boundaries that enable us to become aware of it and experience it. However, if we want to move through space, we must always make use of its empty sections, avoiding obstacles, bypassing matter. This may remind us of the often neglected and not easily imagined fact that all matter chiefly contains empty space.[2] It is only the invisible interconnections, the energy interactions between them, that create the ultimate illusion of solidity and stability. The reality, however, is movement, constant rearrangement, processes of birth and decline, renewal and growth.
