Vendula Chalánková
*1981 (Czech Republic)
studies: Technical University in Brno, Faculty of Fine Arts, studio of environmental studies
lives and works in Brno and Troubky nad Bečvou
Painter, author of book illustrations, comics, film animations, whose work reflects immediacy, insularity, criticism without calculation, although often gratefully mocking all the wrongs of the present. of the present. She contrasts it, along with the clumsy pace of society, with the uneasy and laborious manual work and its lasting result. With a refined sense of artistic shorthand, she transforms ordinary situations and everyday objects into artistic stories and artefacts. Least of all in the triennial, she travels along a timeline, but has a great command of the mockumentary technique.
nineties (2021)
The fiction of the door, the fiction of the image, the fiction of the space behind the door. But Chalánková goes further, the confusing title Nineties plunges one into the 1990s, where this detail of the “steel” aluminium door plays only the role of a surviving memory. The transformation period, full of post-revolutionary ideals, has its roots in normalisation, which in its relentless inertia since the 1970s produced, as if on a treadmill, aluminium profiles for window frames and doors. Who would have guessed then that they would sometimes evoke nostalgia in us (despite our wishes or expectations) in the flood of dull white plastic profiles. But the 1990s are also a dimensional standard based on the utilitarian logic of the thing. Vendula Chalánková documents her personal recollection of the past with a range of samples of period production, but samples that were very limited and anyway tended towards a hopeless standardisation. However, the order of the world is reversed; in the overabundance of supply and the ubiquitous banality of details of the new normalisation, the artist pays tribute to typification – by typifying and serialising her own painting production. The mockument as a mystifying tool of description and transcription of the subject works in Chalánková’s work in its absolute brevity. Just grab the handle and enter.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)