On a Boat in the Akashi Bay

The exhibition called On a Boat in the Akashi Bay is not Karolína Mikesková´s first work reflecting her interest in landscape motives. On the contrary, she has been concerned with this topic for a long time, she has been studying landscape compositions in works of famous old masters and romantic painters. First of all she decided to rebuild her flat and change the harmony of colour of the interior. Then she took a series of coloured photographs of the final still-lives, situated under selected sceneries, and gave them simple names according to the depicted subjects – Marine, Mountain Gill, Old Bridge in the Moors (2012). In her following spatial installations, inspired by the works of Japanese painters, she started working with principles and the specific nature of Japanese landscape painting which differ substantially from the stereotypes of European art which evolved for centuries and was based on realistic perspective aiming at the most faithful depiction of three-dimensional reality on the surface of canvas or paper. However, she handles these principles freely, she does not scrutinize them and so her knowledge does not set limits. She works intuitively with individual forms and relationships between them.
The first part of the series of compositions Landscape with a Waterfall (2012) was created in the austere interior of her studio and was based on the principle of a faithful imitation of the model. But she used quite different means of expression – remnants of various materials, such as boards, mouldings, polythene sheets. In the installation Kikuchi Keigetsu made for the exhibition space Vitrína Deniska in Olomouc she used fabric evoking the flowing brushwork of ink painting. At the same time she reacted to the surrounding environment – a busy mall with jewellery shops, boutiques and a haberdashery shop. The composition made of silk and velvet with seasonal window dressing components obeys the rules on which the model composition was based – the painting by Kikuchi Keigetsu called Waterfall. On the other hand the composition also obeys rules of quite a different system – rules for shop-window dressing apprentices.
While in her previous works she focused on the effect of the whole composition, in her installation Landscape in Cursive Style (2012) inspired by the painting of the same name by Sesshu Toyo she divided the composition for the first time into individual isolated parts which she rendered in the form of small plaster casts and then used them again to recreate an imaginary landscape composition. She worked in a similar way when working on her sculptural composition for the Gallery Jelení where she focused more on the viewers of her work. In the first exhibition room she hung a shelf on the wall on which she placed a small porcelain vase painted with a Japanese landscape motif. A common decorative object which usually collects dust was taken out of its natural household environment to represent a starting point for understanding the situation in the second exhibition room. In the centre of the second room she placed a cascade made of exhibition plinths on which she placed different plastic forms, hard to identify at first sight. Although the angle of viewing the work may seem to be given, the artist leaves the viewer to find his own place in the picture. She makes him walk around the installation and carefully examine it in order to find new views and perspectives, as if really walking in a landscape and observing it from different places in space and time. She encourages the viewer to return to the first room and look for connections between the sculptural composition and an abandoned trinket.
The installation On a Boat at the Akashi Bay and Karolína´s preceding work inspired by Japanese painting have one thing in common. The artist goes in the opposite direction than is usual in art, her work is based on flat depiction of reality. Individual elements, on which the composition is based, are isolated, taken out of the surface and then rearranged to form new spatial relations. She works with the tendency of viewers to perceive paintings in a static manner. Her approach can be compared to a traveller on an adventure trip equipped only with superficial knowledge gained from guidebooks but he is full of expectations and keeps his eyes wide open. Viewers are expected to join her on the trip.

Nina Michlovská