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       Artist Statement

 

        My artistic production focuses on the environment, materials, their associations, and imagination. I draw inspiration from my memories and situations that happened when I grew up. In my mind, I re-collage these remembrances which I convey to the three bodies of my work: from classical image format, montage of paintings to the sculpture and installation.

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       During the past five years, my artistic production has evolved as a chain. I call it “the chain of occasions.”

These visualizations of remembrances mingle and follow each other throughout different works and materials.

The metaphorically speaking “Enter the Void 2015 “is the central construction pillar of my chain of occasions.

“Enter the Void 2015” is inspired by A. Böcklin’s island of dead from Greek mythology. I worked on this subject for three years; then I turned to another cycle of work: “RAUM 2018.” This work is inspired by ceremony halls, curtains, and decorative baroque ceilings. In my most recent work, I focused on working with recycling of curtains and with new media and named the artworks “Tapestry and Watching the Waves 2019.”

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        The crossing of borders, of past and present time, I reflect this in my works and show it through central motives such as water rippling, curtains or recycled materials. I try to connect the world of the past to the world of the present using different materials and associations. I search for visual and sensual inspiration in the composition of pieces of architecture, historical methods and the aesthetics of the Eastern Europe of the 1990’s.

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        I am originally from the Upper Palatine Forest (the“Czech Forest”) located at the border of Bohemia and Germany in the Sudetenland. I am soaked with the architecture of baroque churches and modernist buildings, with their elements from Eastern Europe and the Chinese or Russian aesthetics which came into my country during the communist era. I grew up on a construction site which was my main playground, and my toys were building materials. Their rawness and coldness and my deep memories is what I reflect in my work. I experience this mixture of regional tastes as fundamentally strange. It is about the fake and the real materials, and this is what my work is infused with. I make use of those particular materials as fragments that bear a message, and, based on their aesthetic cheapness or nobility, I assemble them into pictures and objects.

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                                                                   “Montage is a theory of relationality.”

                                           Alexander Kluge, Raw Materials for the Imaginationis, Berlin 2011

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        The work procedure, especially my way of setting up paintings and installations, is inspired by the philosopher, filmmaker, and writer Alexander Kluge. The way he choreographs, makes collages and assembles the associations of the spectators in his works is what I stick to as well.

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       One of the memories I work with, for instance, is when my parents replaced the old quality furniture at our house with cheap made furniture, just because they thought it looked more modern. Or when we put plastic flowers into our living room because they look more colorful and last longer.I reflect on how to play with those fluid contrasts between natural and artificial impressions and materials. This provokes visual references in a specific time and environment on the one hand, while reflecting and talking about my childhood on the other hand. I stick to the principle that the concept of a work should follow material memories, the sensations one wishes to express, and that it is guided by personal storytelling.

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       This is the strategy I use to approach a my topic and share my feelings and insights with others. It allows me to work freely without limitations using many different methods and materials and express the topic of my artworks by clustering and manifesting memories and experiences.

 

Marketa Jachimova, 2020 

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