NEW YORK, NY.- Maccarone is presenting the first New York gallery exhibition of Prague-based artist Eva Koťátková, a mouse’s home is the snake’s body.
Koťátková has been making collage, performance, film, sculpture, and multimedia installations for the last ten years — often synthesizing several of these media together at once. Born in Prague in 1982, Koťátková was a young girl during the fall of the Communist Party in her country. Thus, her practice has long dealt with institutional contexts, ideologies, and codes, responding to the possibilities and impossibilities of personal space and the physical limits imposed by the rules associated with such frameworks.
In her numerous shows across Europe and in the States, Koťátková has staged the relationship between human beings, ideas, and objects in psycho-physical dramas rife with the agency of Surrealism and an eastern European sensibility. However idiomatic in expression, there is a universal force to Koťátková’s practice, applicable to any strict system and the metaphor of suppression, exposing power structures and materializing the feeling or situation of mental restriction, making visible that which is invisible.
For her first exhibition at Maccarone, Koťátková presents a new body of work developed through art workshops she conducts with child patients at Prague’s main psychiatric hospital. Using collage, sculpture, text, and audio, Koťátková bodies forth her central artistic concern: individuals isolated within social structures that they cannot assimilate into. Her tableau makes material and renders visible the conventions of restriction. In collecting these patients’ stories and drawings, Koťátková’s installation catalogs the unfolding narrative told above.
The steel sculptures on view throughout the gallery, in varying scale, are inspired by the children’s drawings symbolizing their fears — snakes, fences, and fractured bodies are primary motifs. Koťátková’s figures inhabit the exhibition space and turn it into an enlarged notebook through which the viewer can walk. In essence, there is no division between a collage and an object, lines and figures step into the space and onto the paper. Inner states are given a variety of depictions from staged scenes to abstracted, often tangled forms or phantoms.
This group of works builds upon Koťátková’s recent large-scale exhibition, Two-Headed Biographer and the Museum of Ideas, at the Prádelna Gallery in the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital. This presentation took place over several months in the form of a series of installations as well as performances and tableau vivants that simultaneously questioned both the institution of the clinic and the mental worlds of the patients within. It also relates to her multimedia piece, “Asylum,” in the 2013 Venice Biennale’s The Encyclopedic Palace, which was devoted to dreams and hallucinations.
Eva Koťátková lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been exhibited internationally in recent solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA; the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany; Modern Art Oxford, UK; and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany. Group exhibitions include the 2015 New Museum Triennial, New York, USA; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; 2012 Sydney Biennale, Australia, 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia; and the 2013 Venice Biennale as part of The Encyclopedic Palace. At 25, she was the youngest person to ever be awarded the Jindrich Chalupecky Award for young artists in the Czech Republic. “Pictorial Atlas of a Girl Who Cut a Library into Pieces,” Koťátková’s largest
