Lenka Vítková

📍 Venue → GHMP

Lenka Vítková’s assembly of paintings writes the end of description. More accurately, the germ of collecting works that may be art-historically interpreted to exist in the fulcrum of the figurative and the abstract is found in the recurring gestures that do not become habit or poetry. The painter, however, is fascinated with text: every text hangs shortly before and shortly after a unit of meaning that can be assigned to a painting. All are asynchronous. She once wrote a fragment of poeisis, “The moment where before turns into after.” It is the weight of reorientation, and the picture is gravity. The pull of chronology in Vítková’s paintings results in a suspension of events, which, for example, are unlike the dizzying capture of photography; they are stills of undulating bodies, petals, strokes, and ropes. In confronting them, it is helpful to imagine that they were painted from an angle—a slope if you will—where the painter is perpetually off balance, adjusting the unattainable height and center of perspective.

Lenka Vítková (*1975) is a visual artist living in Prague. Her practice includes the creation of painted canvases or small plaster objects and fragmentary texts and installations. She is interested in interweaving personal themes with cosmic perspectives and seeing the whole in lost fragments. She has recently published her texts and paintings in the artist book The First Book of Emblems (Brno: Fait Gallery, 2022). Her texts have been included in the anthologies Sorting Words (eds. M. Kubačáková and O. Buddeus, Prague: tranzit.cz, 2016) and Animal Touch (eds. H. Janečková and E Koťátková, Prague: ArtMap, 2021). Together with Anne-Claire Barriga, Filip Cenk, and Markéta Lisa, she publishes the Czech-French poetry zine Mamka. In addition to exhibitions of her own work, she has carried out several curatorial projects and from 2006 to 2010 curated a space for contemporary art in Olomouc called simply 36.