Snake

Youth Gallery launches its series of independent exhibitions with a show by Johana Merta, a student at Brno’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Using the language of symbols and metaphors, she takes a subjective look at the links between human imagination and the formative experiences of early childhood. The exhibition also addresses the incongruity of transferring the unfettered landscape of children’s imagination into the ordered institutional nature of the gallery.

Merta’s work is based on forgotten (and later mediated) ideas and situations, creating a sense of tension between their inaccessibility and their evocation. The key symbol of her surreal intermedia composition is a snake, her invisible childhood friend – which, transformed, takes on the dimensions of a visual archetype. Merta’s works are always based on personal mythologies, although their transformation into a symbolic language activates dormant mental layers within human consciousness that express themselves through strong emotional reactions.