“Liza Libenko’s visual world captivates with the raw beauty of melancholy, decadence, and an omnipresent apocalypse. We witness suggestive cuts of an emotional landscape, where past experiences are intertwined with a dreamlike atmosphere that exists in an indefinite time and place. Dreams turn into nightmares, and inhospitable environments deny any form of life. We do not see figures or fragments of bodies. Human existence is only evoked through industrial materials combined with organic remnants as a memento of the thin line between life and death.
Living in Prague, visual artist Liza Libenko continues the line of evocative images in which she combines various techniques and original methods. Her previous significant series of charred, burnt sunflowers gradually transform towards more universal images describing the state of society, consciousness, and inner experience. The visual poetics and unconventional forms of beauty lean towards themes from the dark side of the Moon.
The artist’s first solo exhibition at Karpuchina Gallery is an imaginary ritual space created by her current series of paintings, site-specific installations, and poetry. The cohesive environment is grounded in the ideas and atmosphere of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, bringing new motifs and metaphors into her work, thus updating and developing her mature visual program.
Similar to her past works, her current pieces confront the possibilities of hanging paintings, in which diverse painting techniques merge with objects and sculptural processes. The resulting spatial works are raw, full of textures, details, and physical layers. The very mixture of materials—oil, asphalt, blood, soil, and plant remains—opens a range of connotations. However, it is the wire objects with their sharp structures that, together with the selection of motifs, provide a complex and intense narrative.
Libenko creates an intimate and mystical atmosphere, which she doses through created situations, scenes, and quoted poetry. At the center of her interest is the symbol and shape of the circle, which she develops through the forms of the Sun, the Moon, or the definition of a ritual and, at the same time, a safe space. The Sun alternates with the Moon and night, where everything dies and withers, followed by the arrival of a new day. We witness the natural cycle that emphasizes our transience. Existential motifs are found in stylized forms within the paintings, but also in spatial realizations that expand into the complex environment.
The artist disrupts her painting techniques with rooted wire flowers (of evil), which emerge from the paintings and stretch toward the remains of a ritual space marked by burnt candles. She creates an imaginative world on the boundary between dream and apocalyptic reality, where ritualized symbolism and hints of possession trigger inner monologues, reflections on existence, and silent dialogues about what has happened and what will follow.” – Michal Stolárik, curator of the exhibition
Karpuchina Gallery, founded in 2016, has quickly established itself as a progressive force in Prague’s contemporary art scene. It showcases a diverse, carefully curated program of Czech and international artists, focusing on innovation and fostering dialogue between the viewer and the artwork. Located at Rybná Street in a historic building that once housed a fish market, the gallery’s logo reflects its roots.