Lucia Tallová: Moving Clouds

Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2026

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Lucia Tallová was born in 1985 in Bratislava, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and where she continues to live and work. Since 2023, a prominent figure from the international art world has been invited to select artists for the “Artist of the Year” award, with this role rotating every two years. The Slovak artist was nominated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin.

The title of Lucia Tallová’s exhibition, Moving Clouds, evokes clouds endlessly moving across the sky, embodying the perpetual cycle of becoming and passing away. In her work, however, “moving” also refers to an emotional and inner movement: the experience of being touched by the world, by its beauty as well as by its increasing destruction.

At first glance, Tallová’s room-filling installation for the PalaisPopulaire appears to be an almost surreal journey into the past. Yet the artist is ultimately concerned with a highly personal examination of the present. Her works explore memory, layers of history, and the ways in which the past continues to exist within the present. She interweaves personal and collective narratives with references to art history, architecture, and the legacy of modernism. Her works reflect the profound transformations of recent decades: the collapse of political systems, the disappearance of industrial worlds, technological change, ecological threats, and the increasing vulnerability of democratic societies.

From a feminist perspective, Tallová examines human civilization and the patriarchal structures that have shaped it. She traces a history in which the oppression and marginalization of women are inseparable from the exploitation of nature. In response, she develops new, associative forms of storytelling and archiving. The wooden structures that house her collages, paintings, and assemblages resemble expansive tableaux, but also improvised archives or fragments of a theatrical set. The bent columns of the central sculpture group Fragility of Caryatid (2025) likewise evoke the atmosphere of a stage production.

Using found objects, pages from books and magazines, paper, wood, and photography, Tallová creates an immersive Gesamtkunstwerk that engages poetically and critically with the fragility of memory in an accelerated, digitized present.

Fragile worlds made of paper

The first thing that strikes one about Lucia Tallová’s works on paper is their object-like, almost sculptural quality. She finds the source material for her collages and assemblages, which are inhabited by women and female stereotypes from a wide range of historical periods, at flea markets and in antique shops: illustrated books about the 1974 Spartakiad, fashion and film magazines from the 1950s, and publications on the temples and sculptures of Classical Antiquity. Tallovácombines the facial features of postwar models with the faces of Baroque Madonnas. She allows staircases, columns, and architectural elements to emerge from the collage like images in a pop-up book. Elsewhere, assembled female bodies merge with depictions of plants, twine, fragments of mountain ranges, and planetary orbits. Branches may lie across the paper like nerve pathways or flashes of lightning; stones become ornaments in the hair on the picture surface. Everything in these collages and assemblages pushes toward three-dimensionality, toward spatial presence.

The origins of this approach lie in painting, in the use of black paint, which Tallová first applied to create her semi-abstract, cloud-like paintings and later used to transform photographs and motifs taken from books and magazines. Over time, she began treating paper as a sculptural material that she could “shape,” fixing it in place so that it retains a specific position and tension. The paper is creased or crumpled, fanned out or folded, with corners protruding like wings or spreading like undergrowth. Through this process, Tallová creates precise yet intuitive compositions—forms of montage in which images overlap, motifs connect, and hidden memories or associations are brought to the surface. At the same time, her works create the impression that the history and condition of the material itself have been preserved, as though a moment has been suspended in time.

Tallová extends this technique into her assemblages. She places collages beneath glass domes, wedges charcoal between frames, glass, and paper, and allows it to extend beyond the image and frame, growing into a new image on the wall. Abstract structures emerge from dyed, crumpled paper; paper works are combined with fragments of furniture and parts of chair legs. This paper-based universe is both delicate and remarkably adaptable. In Tallová’s work, the possibilities of combining materials and forms seem almost limitless, allowing them to enter into entirely new relationships with the surrounding space.

Material and memory

Everything, including ephemeral phenomena, overlooked biographies, everyday memories, and found objects, sets something in motion in this art. Through montage and recombination, Tallová imbues bodies, objects, and materials with beauty, emotion, and new, universal meanings. In this process, there are no hierarchies; nothing is considered too insignificant, banal, or simple. Her practice is grounded in an idea that is as poetic as it is materialist: that history is inscribed into every form of matter, into every material, whether living or non-living, organic or artificial. This includes geological history, the histories of civilizations, progress, technology, and culture, as well as fleeting personal memories. Materials absorb these recollections as traces, like a subtle energy, and preserve them like sediment.

Tallová’s work can be understood as that of an archaeologist, historian, or sociologist: a form of artistic forensics that uncovers hidden narratives. Bratislava and Slovakia, together with the wider Central and Eastern European region shaped by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, form an important source of inspiration. The books, illustrated volumes, encyclopedias, and magazines she encounters in her everyday surroundings, in second-hand bookshops and at flea markets, offer a cross-section of what people here have read and looked at since the early twentieth century, revealing the images and ideals that have shaped collective consciousness, ideology, and social norms over the decades. The subjects of these publications range from Classical Antiquity and the Habsburg Monarchy to postwar modernity: the era of reconstruction, socialist progress, and industrialization in both Eastern and Western Europe.

Male fantasies, female bodies

“Historically,” Tallová said in an interview in 2025, “the female body has been perceived more as an object than the subject of its own history. It bears traces of pressure, deformation, and constant efforts to conform to a definednorm.” Her collages and assemblages speak precisely to this condition. They are inhabited by deformed female bodies that nevertheless must maintain their composure: female workers, athletes, and models whose achievements and lives were excluded from the male-dominated canon of modernism and postwar modernism.

The artist allows female bodies to merge with all manner of architecture designed and built by men. The bodies themselves assume the function of columns and ornaments, or become architecture in their own right. In one work, legs in silk stockings and patent leather shoes emerge from one of the most famous buildings of Italian Fascism, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, inaugurated in 1940, appearing as frivolous as figures in a cabaret performance from the Weimar era. In other works, women must literally bear the weight of history. Young female gymnasts form the foundation of towers made from ancient temples or recreate Stalinist monuments dedicated to heroic figures.

This idea is fully articulated in the installation Fragility of Caryatid (2025). The work consists of a group of bent fragments of Ionic columns into which poster-like images of ancient female sculptures, mostly headless torsos, have been inserted. Through this, Tallová refers to the gender metaphors embedded in ancient architecture and sculpture. Caryatids are female figures used in place of columns or pillars. Unlike male Atlantes, who appear to struggle beneath the weight of architectural elements, caryatids are expected to carry the load gracefully on their heads. They embody a disciplined femininity that is not permitted to reveal its effort. In Tallová’sinterpretation, they have disappeared: the columns are bent, damaged, or broken.

Between new beginnings and decline

Tallová’s work confronts viewers with a sense of transience. It presents the remnants of lives once lived: pieces of furniture with which someone once furnished a home, books that someone once read and collected, objects that once belonged to someone, anonymous photographs that were once personal memories. These are dreams of progress and the future, of which only ruins remain.

“I rediscover ancient civilisations,” says Tallová, “and build utopian worlds that then fall prey to destruction once again to destruction. After many unsuccessful attempts throughout history, these unstable structures collapse. Human existence is predestined to perish. It seems to have lost the ability to function within the current system and the dystopian vision of the future. The body succumbs to time, to ageing and finitude.” This may not sound hopeful. Yet the statement offers a realistic description of a state of constant historical change and uncertainty, of repeated new beginnings that have become an everyday reality for many people.

Tallová’s artistic practice, writes Sam Bardaouil, “emerges from a specific geography: Central and Eastern Europe, a landscape shaped by the collapse of communism and the ongoing archaeology of its ruins. The flea market and the second-hand shop—sites where she discovers her objects—are not neutral reservoirs. They are the informal museums of a region where the circulation of fragments testifies to the discontinuities of history.” In this sense, Tallová “stages not merely the memory of objects but the condition of a society where memory itself is unstable, fractured, suspended between regimes.”

Although the exhibition repeatedly refers to socialist culture and its diverse currents, styles, and ideologies, it is not exclusively concerned with a critical or nostalgic reassessment of the past. Nor is it about drawing comparisons between East and West. Rather, it focuses on an in-between state: rupture, uncertainty, and unresolved tensions that only become visible and tangible through collage and recombination. Against the monolithic narratives that allow no breaks or ambiguity, Tallová sets something fragile, fractured, and assembled: the utopia of a “feminine” world in which domination and power are no longer central, and in which everything exists in a state of interdependence.

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