Pandora’s Vox / Veronika Holcová, Klara Kristalova, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra 15. 7. 2015 – 1. 11. 2015

An exhibition deriving its title from the name of the seductive yet unyielding Greek mythological figure presents works by Czech artist Veronika Holcová, Klara Kristalova (Sweden), and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Germany). Though they draw on different cultural backgrounds and life experiences, their artistic idioms feature certain similarities of existential nature.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (b. 1967) spent her early youth in Chile, and has sought and found a major source of creative inspiration, apart from her own authentic life story, in the world of Latin American legends, and in European literature. The aesthetic of her quasi-naive figurative drawings, coupled with her copious use of lettering, harks back to the tradition of votive images as well as acknowledging an affinity with folk culture. At the final stage of making her pencil drawings on paper, the artist impregnates them with wax, thereby assigning them the appearance of sacral objects.

Klara Kristalova (b. 1967), an artist of Czech extraction, has spent her whole life so far in Sweden. Her ceramic sculptures with coloured glaze surfaces concentrate, content-wise, on the traumas experienced by the individual on the cusp of adulthood, facing up to the overwhelming pressures of society. Similarly as Sandra de la Horra, Kristalova too draws a good deal of inspiration from literature, most notably from the writings of the Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen.

Veronika Holcová (b. 1973) avowedly embraces in her work the legacy of the Czech Surrealist movement, Romantism, and Symbolism. Her output oscillates between two opposite poles: figurative works on paper wherein a condensed central scene stands out in contrast to white background; and paintings of boundless dream landscapes, only sporadically inhabited by solitary figures. There, she treats her iconic character, Lilith, with a slightly ironic sense of detachment.