LUCIA TALLOVA

​

​

The Tomas Umrian gallery curatorial project for the ART-O-RAMA 2022 represents solo exhibition of established Slovakian artist Lucia Tallová (1985). The curatorial selection consists of paintings, objects, photographic collages and assamblages, 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 dis- appear, 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 The artist works with historical content, drawing on various eras, and uses old photos from the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.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.

​

​