Michaela Černická
* 1970 (Czech Republic)
studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
lives and works in Prague
Painter, illustrator and restorer and author of subtle works and interventions that require the viewer’s immediate gaze. In her drawings, paintings and photographs she creates thematic series, usually realized over months or years. Through systematic personal records, she layers different time and plays with its passage – events appear and disappear, phenomena on the edge of the material and immaterial merge, disparate visual events, both natural and those caused by human activity, interact with each other. He likes to use and paraphrase restoration technological procedures.
Documentary Probes IV, 2024
The series Documentary Probes has been developed by the artist since 2018. It follows specific themes generated by the space she is currently in. After the Via art gallery and Pragovka in Prague, she works at the Mikulov Castle, and now she is delving into the masonry and plasterwork of the Museum of Art. A building with a very complicated history, from a monastery to a prison and a cabaret to exhibition halls and depositories, it offers varied material.
Using restoration probes and retouches, with the help of archival materials and photographs, the exhibition analyses and imaginatively reveals to the viewer the assumed and unassumed historical layers hidden in the plaster of the interior spaces. He transforms the restoration method of stratigraphic probes into artistic research. The moment of fiction and manipulation of local history is purely in the hands of the author. He creates a mockument of changes, events, human destinies, whose identification is deliberately obscured by painting techniques. Previously distinct photographic documents, implemented in the uncovered layers of time and painted layers, gradually degrade, fade and become a new layer, a part of future history.