Stuff – Alice Nikitinová
10th April – 15th May 2010.
Opening 9th April 2010, 6-8 pm
Alice Nikitinová’s (born 1979 in Zatec, CZ) first exhibition at BolteLang is titled Stuff – Stuff as in odds and ends or bits and pieces. Stuff is everywhere around us, it is arbitrary and frequent. So much so that we do not consciously register it or remember it. It resonates of masses of information, images and objects, which flood our immediate reality.
A glove, a letterbox, a petrol can: they are found things. Some appear as image on the image. Others are objects covered in paint and become (free standing) ‘image-objects’. The thing becomes an object and the object becomes an image. Nikitinová’s works take their starting point in modernist shapes and formal quotes from everyday life. She plays sensitively with the connotation of common objects by disordering their association.
‘I am also collecting some ready-mades, because they attract me by their useless and dummy appearance. Sometimes the boundary between creating and collecting almost disappear. Painting or sculpture is mostly a result of observation, which you need to embody later on. Ready-made is somehow also a result of observation – but only what you need for realisation is to grab it.’
Alice Nikitinovà’s imagery carries a distinct opaque colourfulness. The artist grapples with the boundaries and possibilities of painting without making them the central theme of her paintings. She concentrates on the relationship between image, object and viewer by separating the conceptual classification from the purely formal qualities of the works. Nikitinová’s painting appears ‘modern’ – nevertheless it would be wrong to say that her works cite the classic modernist tradition of geometric abstraction. On first impression the pictures convey a sense of clarity and assertiveness. ‘I am interested in tension between those common stuff, which are part of our daily routine, and art stuff, which is meant to be kind of festive object. Serving and served items appear on the same level of attention. In fact, its not necessary to have a painting, because its possible to admire beauty of a broom, staying in the corner, or of a unrolled toilet paper, making a white-snow long line’.
2007 – 2009 Nikitinová had a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and participated in the Prague Biennale 4 in 2009. She will have a solo show at Juliette Jongma Gallery in Amsterdam later this year.
Jacqueline Uhlmann