- This event has passed.
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Double Q Gallery is pleased to present Soft, Hidden, Exposed, the gallery’s first group show featuring three emerging female artists from Central and Eastern Europe: Karolina Bielawska, Kateřina Ondrušková and Monika Žáková. With seven works from different painting classifications, the exhibition annotates trends in abstract and figurative art from subtle, sensitive and profound female perspectives. Soft, Hidden, Exposed opens on 17 June and runs through 16 July.
The exhibition’s variable presentation includes layered figural motifs extracted from fragments of observation and memories, contradictorily complex creation of minimalism and Trompe l’Oeil paintings that deceive viewers. While the comprehensive historical references and recurring iconographical elements are woven into each other and combine formal languages and culture of the millennium generations by oscillating between figurative and abstraction. The creative positions of each work echo each other through the associations “soft”, “hidden” and “exposed” evoke – characterised by the softness that emerges from behind the structures, the hidden references revealed by motifs, and the exposed use of forms and figures integrated within the pictorial spaces.
Polish artist Karolina Bielawska (b. 1986) finished her study of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2015. Bielawska’s distinctive use of black and blue hues, curved and angular abstract shapes and structures are often based on architectural and local historical prototypes, including architectural motifs of iconic Polish modernist villas built between the two world wars, for example, the arches of balconies and staircases. Furthermore, the asphalts and industrial paints she uses in her abstract paintings can also be interpreted as references to the inspiration of the architectural models. Her interpretation of simplicity and hard-edge painting is contravention by mixing various techniques and materials such as bituminous masses, plasterboard, enamels and varnishes, pushing the classical painting boundaries toward installation.
Czech-born Kateřina Ondrušková (b. 1991) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the class of Josef Bolf in 2019. Working with natural motifs in her paintings, especially flowers, Ondrušková’s deeply personal art is primarily inspired by cultivated nature and built gardens, sceneries of which she fuses with melancholic fragments of memories. She often combines close-ups of the referred natural formations and flower gardens with figures that mysteriously emerge or disappear into the background, scratched into layers of paint. The superimposed, overlapped, hidden and translucent layers of images expand the perspectives in Ondrušková’s pictorial spaces and allow the viewers to come up with intuitive interpretations, bringing narrative stories to life.
Another Czech artist Monika Žáková (b. 1987) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2012 in the class of J. Sopko. Emphasising the precise elaboration of themes, Žáková’s distinctively minimalistic, meditative and clean surfaces refer to trompe-l’œil painting, a form that seeks to mislead the vision. Žáková is also fascinated by the interaction of materials, especially canvas and paper, while aluminium, metal sheet and plaster are also materials she is known to work with occasionally. In recent years, she has created remarkable combinations jesting between the borders of classical paintings and fine reliefs. In the artist’s own words, her works “push the boundaries between surface, space, image and object through the act of creation”.
