Néphéli Barbas / The Sky Serene as a Vast Aquarium
Fait Gallery PREVIEW
25. 10. 2023 – 13. 1. 2024
Opening: 25. 10. 2023, 7 p.m.
Curator: Eva Slabá
The exhibition The Sky Serene as a Vast Aquarium of the French artist of Greek origin Néphéli Barbas will present her latest series of works based on her long-term wanderings through the city environment. Through her works, the artist shows how Prague can become Paris or how Brussels can be Buenos Aires.
Néphéli Barbas presents in the Fait Gallery PREVIEW, Brno her latest series of works. In her art she focuses on depicting fleeting moments, a mixture of experiences, impressions and findings. By capturing them, she ensures that the moments endure and prevents them and herself from being forgotten "...because the city and the sky never remain the same" (Calvino 2007). The works are based on a long-term journey through urban environments across cities and countries.
The phenomenon of layering various cultural or architectural expressions and styles in different time periods has long been present in the artist’s work. Her drawings depict encounters between a "baroque" stucco ceiling and columns and a plasma screen, a wooden neo-Gothic gatehouse and a security camera, or car garages located below a statue from the era of socialist realism. "Néphéli Barbas’s exhibition can be thus seen as a travelogue of ambivalent places floating in a limbo; an attempt at an excursion into the memory of a space that becomes the central narrator of a story," says the exhibition curator Eva Slabá about Néphéli Barbas's work. The drawings are adapted in structurally sophisticated installations at the intersection of object and exhibition architecture, with the use of bent metal sheets or colour glass display cases, both of which distantly adopt the terminology of mid-20th century modernism.
Néphéli Barbas (*1990) is a Greek-French artist living in Prague. She studied at Villa Arson in Nice, in 2012-2013 she was on an Erasmus exchange at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and in 2016 completed her postgraduate studies at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. She has participated in three residencies in Argentina. She also completed an artist residency in the PRÁM Studio, Prague and her most recent residency so far was in 2019 at Riddergade AIR, Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark. Barbas has had solo exhibitions in the Sculpture Gallery, Hořice (2023), Berlin Model, Prague (2023), Centre d'Art Fernand Léger, Port de Bouc (2023), Prám Studio, Prague (2021 and 2018) and Ancien Evêché, Toulon in collaboration with Villa Noailles (2021). She has taken part in collective shows in the Karlín Studios (Prague, 2021), Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille (2020) and Eleven Steens (Brussels, 2020), among others.
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Viktorie Chomaničová
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