Artist: Pavla Malinová
Exhibition title: Keyhole, labyrinth of the soul
Curated by: Jakub Adamec
Venue: Szara Gallery, Katowice, Poland
Date: September 29 – October 27, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Szara Gallery, Katowice
Through the keyhole. You cannot see the soul. If you managed to get quite close to someone, you could begin to see it a bit; to sense it. But in that very moment the turnings and corners of the labyrinth would already begin to appear.
Pavla Malinová is one of the most interesting Czech painters of the young generation. Keyhole, labyrinth of the soul—her first solo show in Poland—consists of series of the latest paintings, mostly created during this year. In last three years, a recurrent motif, a figurative and ambiguous element, has been reappearing in Pavla Malinová’s paintings: a hole–figure. The motif of keyhole appears only in her latest works, whilst labyrinth could be found already in her earlier works.
Paintings by Pavla Malinová are coded messages. They are defined by abundant formative play with experience which serves as a foundation of her imagination. This melting—rearranging and forming new morphologies—is at odds with protocols of both perspective and prospective rationality. Regarding the form and the content of her works, Malinová draws from esoteric art (trash ezo), folk art (folkpunk), popculture and various modes of expression used in painting today and historically. In her works, the consciousness interweaves with the unconscious; cognition threads with experience and emotions. It is a synthesis of figurative and abstract structures and ornaments. Thus, we can also find symbols in her works. They are the traces of personal and collective memories, psyche and culture. As for the titles, Pavla Malinová often resorts to a word play (she has showed sensibility to language already during her studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ostrava when she was a songwriter and a singer in electropunkblackpop band Like She). In her expression, Pavla Malinová is sometimes broad, almost sweeping; at other times, she is subtle and delicate. This creates extraordinary textual richness into which she cyphers her messages – sensitive reactions to the internal and external world which form yet an other world. This other world is created through interweaving metaphoric visual and linguistic elements sometimes covered in a veil of irony. Pavla Malinová paints everything which is hybrid. The distinctiveness of her work emerges from this complex and compounded source.
Pavla Malinová lives and works in Prague.
