Martina Chloupa / I don't need words in order to understand

White Unicorn Gallery in Klatovy

1. 2. - 30. 3. 2014

White Unicorn Gallery in Klatovy 
1. 2. - 30. 3. 2014

The exhibition presents Martina Chloupa as an artist with a broad expressive range whose work and experience possess an inherent unity. At the White Unicorn Gallery, Chloupa will be exhibiting paintings representing different aspects of her work: portraits and figure painting, floral arrangements, sacral themes, and works that lean towards abstraction, with reality always immediately present in each painting’s foundation. For Chloupa, this broad range is a natural expression that flows like speech without words. Although she is essentially a conceptual artist (a tricky term, since all art is based on some kind of concept), her art is not contaminated by intellectualizing. She does not need words in order to understand, and she speaks directly and intelligibly without extensive verbal instructions. It is like a book in we might read a personal story about the contamination and purification of a soul in which tenderness meets aggression, angels meet demons, and joy and enchantment meet sorrow and skepticism. The author shares beauty and joy, moments when the mental becomes spiritual. She confesses through universally comprehensible visual symbols. The bells fly off to Rome, crosses sprout on Golgotha, and stars are born in the heavens. Cats screech, look on quietly, or emit velvet purrs in their sleep. In an abstract interior, we find a point of reference, a refuge – a bed. It is both expressive and contemplative in its execution, and works with classical painting techniques combined with pigments and sand or ash to create an almost magical reification of the moment, object, place, and matter.

The third dimension of Martina’s work represented at the exhibition consists of objects that have been carefully selected with a view towards their function: chairs, seats, sofas, armchairs. The artist here literally places the person taking a seat within a certain context. Without words and intelligibly.

Lucie Šiklová