Eastern Promises

STANISLAVA KOVALCIKOVA — THE INDOMITABLE

I got first acquainted with the paintings of Stanislava Kovalcikova in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw “Paint, also known as blood”, curated by Natalia Sielewicz. “Misty” (2017) — one of the most striking and memorable paintings of the exhibition — is based on the classic motif of the ‘reclining nude’, a modern-day ‘Olympia’. However, virtually every compositorial aspect established through history in terms of racial and gender relations is twisted and turned in Kovalcikova’s sheer impenetrable painting.

The most disruptive element is the quasi cubist doubling of the face of the nude which is split into a profile of a female in bright light with delicate feminine features and long blonde hair, and a more masculine frontal portrait, its face overshadowed. The body is lit from an extreme angle dividing the surface of its skin into two spheres, one smooth and white, one dark and burned.

“I think I paint skin color as some kind of outer shell, the face is the story and the skin color is the voice telling it. Sometimes it evokes heat or burning, dryness, sometimes coldness and ice, rain and snow. The skin is very connected with the element water in my work…” — Stanislava Kovalcikova in conversation with the author, Feb 2021

Kovalcikova’s work reaches beyond the currents of ‘New Figuration’ in contemporary painting invested with acute politics of recognition. Her depictions of multi-ethnic, dark coloured figures and scenes reach — like the complications of her at times dystopian feminist investment — beyond representations of race, beyond representation as such. They are rather ciphers of a contemporary iconoclasm invested with its own path of emancipatory intentions of creating an alternative sociality.

Anke Kempkes