Ladislava Gažiová

Ladislava Gažiová, a Slovak native residing for many years in Prague, is an original artist, who brings together several milieus in her art – post-conceptual art, street art scenes and Romany ethnicity. Gažiová combines the technique of templates spray-painted on a picture with primer paint. The ornamentation used in early work comes from the formal language of graffiti. This trend is also apparent among Czech artists in the handwriting on the works of Jakub Hošek and Anežka Hošková, but for each of them it serves as a form with different intentions.

It's important for Gažiová to evoke in her pictures an atmosphere of feeling which is often connected to a real motif, e.g. an object, figure or setting. The emotions arising from the picture are easily transferable to the viewer, since the themes that the young artist touches on, are generally the transformation of human attitudes and experiences. She places figures in the suggestive setting of a room or natural scenery, without fully expressing this spatial delimitation. Suggestive objects symbolizing communication – a table, box, antenna or wires – appear in almost all her paintings. Great attention is always devoted to the visual reshaping of feeling coming from depicted motifs, i.e. the colour and shapes. Her technique closely communicated with the chosen content.

Ladislava Gažiová likes to expand from the canvas to the wall whereby she achieves a greater “domestication” of her exhibition in a given space and thus directly evokes for the viewer her immediate presence. Her paintings on the wall are not an autotelic gesture of revolt or criticism of a gallery within a gallery, but the means of evoking a certain emotion. A hanging canvas, a large area of a wall spray-painted or a painting on a piece of paper all have a different effect. The artist used the last of these for an exhibition at the Gallery of Critics organized in connection with her winning the Young Painting 2008 competition. Viewers received here flashlights with which they could illuminate the monumental installation. The fact that they were unable to view the painting as a whole only underscored the gloomy atmosphere that prevails in many of Gažiová's paintings. This artist actively continues in her work and advances her warm, and yet gloomy, artistic expression in unexplored directions.

P. Vaňous, Resetting/ Jiné cesty k věcnosti/ Alternative Ways To Objektivity (katalog výstavy), GHMP - Městská knihovna, 21. 12. 2007 - 23. 3. 2008, nestr., Praha 2008

Ladislava Gažiová katalog Prague Biennale 3 str.189

Ladislava Gažiová profil časopis Art&antique 10/2006- Lenka Lindaurová

profil časopis UNI 1/2007 str.32-33, nazov - Příběhy z černé skřínky._Ondřej Váša

rozhovor časopis RESPEKT 35/2007 str.14-15_ Nikdo nevědel, co jsem zač-Karolína Ryvolová