Ele-mental gestures

The exhibition project called „Ele-mental gestures“ presents a duo of middle generation authors who significantly contributed to the Czech and Slovak art scene of the last decade. 

It is a rendezvous of Milan Houser (1971) and Viktor Frešo (1974), two graduates of the Prague AVU, who share a common artwork platform. The authors base their work on post-conceptual stances and create a simple language of minimalistic forms and processes. They prefer to concentrate on a single brisk entree, one direct intervention or a primary shape and as the exhibitions name hints, it’s also about a kindred painting-sculpture dialog of elementary gestures and unequivocal forms.

Houser cultivates his thoughts through the medium of painting – he transport multi-pound acrylic masses onto the canvass, promoting the blind-frame image; he allows the gravity to drag the painting matter down or he lets the acrylate and nitrocellulose finish on the image surface. Frešo utilizes the properties and capabilities of materials (comatex, plastics, wooden logs, aluminum plinths). He creates inverted situations and series of non-functional objects (the red vertical on wheels; the cube of plastic windows; the black cuboid embedded in an aluminum framework and so on.)

The exhibition is dominated by a single uncompromising free gesture, a simple formidable shape, dispensing with the usually mandatory aesthetic overtures. This sort of a mental alignment and crafting of the material in the specific space of Meetfactory gallery brings about the required tension and an interesting dialog in the contemporary language of art.

artistsMilan Houser, Viktor Frešo
curatorsVladimír Beskid
placeMeetFactory
tags
castVladimír Beskid, Viktor Frešo, Milan Houser
cameraJan Vidlička
soundJan Vidlička
editingJan Vidlička
interviewJan Vidlička
translationEva Maršíková
published19. 6. 2011
languageČesky / English
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Ele-mental gestures
The exhibition is not a historical cross-section of Ester Krumbachová's work (although it does reflect it), but rather an extensive network of original material, numerous texts, images, and artifacts that Krumbachová dealt with and surrounded herself with throughout her life. It primarily presents Ester Krumbachová's archive/estate in thematically interconnected blocks, revealing her thinking about costume design, particularly the role of detail and the use of color, the interconnection of meaning, artistic form, and the overall atmosphere of a film, her work with text that copies spoken language and folk storytelling rather than high literary style, her relationship to magic, realism, subjectivity, male and female polarity, and the hierarchy of species and social and professional positions.