neustale-situacie-1605105191 | Danubiana}

Permanent Situations

20. November 2020 - 25. April 2021 Curator: Katarína Bajcurová
Exhibition architecture: Marcel Benčík

The Danubiana is proud to present the results of the most recent cooperative effort of glass artist/painter Palo Macho and photographer Jana Hojstričová. They are not a creative couple in the “classical” sense. Each has their own programs, creations and goals; however, their paths intersect from time to time to achieve an unconventional and innovative dialogue between two personalities and the approaches specific for their “home disciplines.” A dialogue between photography and glass is neither ordinary nor simple. At first, they had to resolve the transfer of photographs to glass, to painting on glass and vice versa as they searched for a way to give glass pictures-objects a new dimension. They worked with light and space, transparency and reflection which occurs after applying a photographic layer on a glass panel remodeled by pigments and heat. Later they set up more complicated goals for themselves, specifically, the means for building a new, unified, spatial structure (from 2D to 3D), where both disciplines and approaches merge into an indivisible whole. This installation features a multiple and “reversible” recovery of wider mental and memory traces and associations. It consists of ingeniously arranged, mutually layered metal and glass constructions, tables and walls with photo-pictures which create a sophisticated – reflexive – labyrinth of “permanent, repeated situations” of our life on light-sensitive and transparent surfaces; situations which we live and lived... Metamorphoses of bodily and non-bodily forms strangely separated by clothing are the common denominator; they parade before us as peculiar shadows, flashes, hints, details or traces, fragments of visual memories and associations which for some may have an involuntary as well as time-specific meaning, and for others they hold a timeless, generalized meaning. Macho and Hojstričová offer a complex visual and mental experience which has its processual stages and states: individual perceptions change not only in connection with the phase of the day and the light intensity you find yourself in, but also in how you physically enter the labyrinth, pass through it, look at it from above. An experience on the edge of seeing and illusion, yet on a newly discovered reflection of the seen and experienced; it is truly worth it.

Katarína Bajcurová

Biography

Palo Macho (1965) and Jana Hojstričová (1972) have cooperated since 2010. Selected joint projects: Crossing Point, Cisternerne – Museet for Moderne Glaskunst, Copenhagen, DK (2013); Body Talk, Glassmuseum Ebeltoft, DK (2014); Outside the Body, SiC! Gallery BWA, Wroclaw, PL (2015); Slowakisches glas, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, DE (2016); Mr. Jekyl Mrs. Hyde, Glassfestival, Wroclaw, PL (2016); Pohled na neviditelnou kůži (A Look at Invisible Skin), Hrad Sovinec, CZ (2017); Konjunkcie (Conjunctions), Galéria Jána Koniarka, Trnava, SK (2017); Version Originale, Centre Tignous d'art contemporain Montreuil, Paris, FR (2018); Medzi stenami (Among Walls), Stredoeurópsky dom fotografie, Bratislava, SK (2018); Plynutí času/Časová shoda (Passing of Time/Time Compliance), Arcidiecezní muzeum, Olomouc, CZ (2018); Images captured in Glass, Hempel Glasmuseum, DK (2019).