Tomas Umrian, Bratislava / Paris
Lucia Tallová
The Tomas Umrian gallery presents a solo exhibition of established Slovakian artist Lucia Tallová (1985). The curatorial selection consists of paintings, objects, photographic collages and assemblages, based on antiquarian materials which artist has been collecting for several years.
This project brings new artworks from three of her recent series – “Second Archive”, “Clouds” and “Mountain Between Us” – assembled into a whole of a spatial installation.
Lucia Tallová composes installations as a scene, where one artwork finishes the other and together, they create a poetically congenial statement. The central theme is our memory, how we preserve our memories and how they fade away and disappear, how they can be changed or manipulated in the course of time.
The Objet trouvé objects and collages are embodiments of the constant search for and collection of old photos, books, prints and various bizarre objects. These become the working material from which new stories, combining reality and fiction, are created.
The artist enters the photographs (bearers of binding visual and content qualities) using black ink, she tears them, layers paper material on the top of them and adds various plastic elements (e.g. stone, textile, porcelain, natural material). In collage compositions, artist works with plasticity and shadows, thus giving photographs a volume and they are coming out of their original format.
The female aspect plays an important role in the works of Lucia Tallová. It manifests itself through the symbols of feminineness, nostalgia and sentiment. The artist works with historical content, drawing on various eras, and uses old photos from the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. She compares the position of women from the beginning of last century with their current situation at the beginning of the 21st. A woman thus becomes the main character of a re-told story, personalised by the artist.
The part of the presentation will be paintings from the series “Clouds”. In the painting of Lucia Tallová we find monochromatic sky and dramatic black clouds in the storm.
Paintings, large-sized canvases, and small watercolours on paper seem to capture movement as a form of a cycle of constancy – water that changes into water vapour; crystallizes and then returns to its original state. This transformation, which is the cypher of motion (but the motion from the perspective of time!), happens also when the images of water vapour vanish before our eyes and disappear into an abstract painting, which is perhaps an even truer portrait of its subject.
`Lucia Tallova often makes use of her earlier ink drawings and watercolours. Previously unseen, pulled out of her archive and reused in collages, these works of art are now “alive again”. Some of the works refer to the automatic drawing, to running in circles or retelling old stories. The central topic in this case is the cyclical repeating, intuitive collecting and preserving, or ceaseless reorganizing of objects in space.
Lucia Tallová was born in 1985 in Bratislava, Slovakia. She lives and works in Bratislava. She is a well established author of the young generation on the Slovak scene, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Painting. Tallová is the winner of several important awards, 2021 – NOVUM Foundation Art Award, 2016 – Tatra Banka Foundation Art Award, 2013 – VUB Bank, Painting of the Year, 2010 – Strabag Kunstforum Art award International.
She attended several artistic residencies – 2020 – Cité internationale des arts Paris, Paris, France, 2019 – Artist in Residence Karla Osorio Gallery, Brasilia, Brazil, 2018 – Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, 2014 – Regular Line Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, 2011 – Strabag Artstudio, Vienna, Austria. Artist’s work is often part of international exhibitions and important artfaires, for example the solo-presentation at Frieze New York, FIAC, Artissima, or SPARK Vienna. At the beginning of 2022, the State Theater Košice (Slovakia) presented the premiere of the opera Tosca by Puccini, for which Lucia Tallová prepared a set design. In September 2022 Lucia Tallová will be one of the selected artist for 16th Biennale de Lyon, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.
Tallová’s work is at the crossroads of various media. She works on photographs and objects that she assembles and deploys in space. The manipulations and themes she approaches create a new link, both material and poetic, between the elements on display. Her installations always respond to a common methodology: objects, paintings,
old photographs, collages and albums are meticulously arranged on a system of wooden shelves. Far from being a simple support, these structures determine each composition. The protocol is rigorously applied to each intervention while responding to different spatial constraints: new forms are born according to the characteristics of the environment.
