A “Fresh Breeze”: thus has Jiří Kovanda named his new exhibition at gb agency. A fresh breeze—invisible and multidirectional—a potential metaphor for the free flow of an artistic endeavor beyond the reach of fashion yet in constant reinvention over the years.
From the streets of Prague where the artist staged discrete actions and interventions in the 1970s to ephemeral sculptures which he elaborates and photographs in his apartment today, by way of drawing, painting, collage and assemblage which he’s done since the 1980s, Jiří Kovanda pursues a practice in which the public and the intimate, the political and the poetic, the visible and the invisible, the humorous and the existential coexist and interrelate. With a remarkable economy of means, Kovanda affects small transformations through the appropriation and reuse of objects, signs and materials from his surroundings, imperceptibly altering the perception of the way things go, while simultaneously performing an inquiry into the essence of artistic gesture and its presence and flow in everyday life.
For this new exhibition, the artist created in his apartment what could be called interior sculptures from modest means: assemblages or arrangements of ordinary simple materials that he calls “still lifes.” Furniture, raw materials and found objects are combined to make up sculpture-collages with titles as basic and evocative as “Autumn”, "Breeze", "Bathing" or "Cave".
While some of the sculptures have been recreated at the gallery for the exhibition, others only endure through “non-professional” pictures taken by the artist, thus recreating the kind of non-differentiation of the passage from action and object to their documentation, comparable to interventions by Kovanda in the 1970s. Indeed, with Kovanda everything appears to tend to the notion of equivalence among formal categories or the permeability between the status of artworks and their designation. Actions, installations and pictures of installations (posters, framed or unframed photos in small or large formats, close-ups and wide shots) recur and unfold throughout the exhibition offering multiple opportunities for sensing and filtering a similar motif, and multiple “traces” to the often imperceptible activities of the artist and his everyday life.
Yoann Gourmel (translation: Miles Hankin)

Opening : Saturday, April 2nd from 4pm to 8pm

mpefm FRANCE art press release