Cityscape

The Baroque vault of the Korek Gallery in Valtice – strikingly similar to the undulating lines of the Central European milieu – hosts nine suspended objects. Their austerity and regular arrangement stand here as a symbol for the city of Kassel, where the artist Darina Molatová spent the last few months as part of her study abroad program. In the tradition of dream interpretation, the house appears as a symbol of the body. The house within the body and the body within the house are, at the same time, a motif that subtly yet periodically surfaces in Darina Molatová’s work. And so, even though the exhibition Perceiving the Landscape speaks primarily of the moment of a quiet encounter between city and landscape, the viewer can weave through the cardboard objects much as a traveler weaves through a multitude of bodies on a crowded street in a foreign city.

Precise, focused examination and systematic naming are the first words that come to mind when I observe the spatial works of sculptor Darina Molatová. It is as if she were driven by a fascination with the encounter between asymmetrical organic forms and the cold perfection of shape (I Am Enough, 2022). I contemplate the undeniable brutality of the act in the calm surface of white plaster pierced by sharp rusty wires (Timeline of Disaster, 2024). Hidden within these sculptures is something that resists articulation, something that eludes the scalpel of the gaze, and the persistent effort to name it highlights the limit event of a language we (do not) master.


text Erika Velická, 2024
photo Pavel Kytner, 2024