Miroslava Večeřová

Miroslava Večeřová is motivated to create by a wish to capture the commonplace using extraordinary means. She is reacting to the modern world and the transformations in our perception in visions in which confusing situations arise and the distinction is blurred between tangible and intangible, real and virtual, physical and imaginary. She herself operates within the interstice thus created. She works mainly with photography, which she studied at the studio of Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM), and the conceptual approach to photography so characteristic of these two artists has unquestionably helped her develop non-traditional work in the medium, in which she explores its properties and searches for its boundaries. Photography expands into space, is layered, becomes tangible or mobile, takes place in the present time, the here and now. It is more like a kind of principle or procedure that the artist draws on. The result may be, in addition to a photographic image, a moving picture, object or performance, and some combination thereof.

The installation of an exhibition as such and the creation and completion of a specific space or the reaction to its architectural specificity and inclusion in the exhibition are important to her. This was clear, for instance, in the exhibition Girlfriend (2016) at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, at which Večeřová cooperated with the English artist Nicole Morris, with whom she studied at Camberwell College in London. She painted the wall in rough stucco and then trickled hot caramel  over the railings, thus intervening in the purity of the functionalist space. This also made reference to another direction present in her work, namely an interest in the hapticity or tactility of materials and their surface in relation to our physicality. Physical contact, running our hands over the surface, procedure, the trickle or dissolution of a material are fundamental elements of her work and have been systematically explored in her cooperation with the painter Pavel Příkaský.

One of the works in which illusion and viewer uncertainty play a role, subsequently becoming the point of the exercise, is the video River (2013), for which Večeřová won the jury’s prize in the competition Other Visions at the PAF Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art in Olomouc. Initially, the static image of a flowing river is disturbed by the artist’s physical intervention in the form of a jump into a pool covered with a large photograph of a river. The assumed reality quickly dissolves, crumbles and sinks, and, as the critic and curator Jiří Ptáček wrote: “Both images thus began to bear witness, both each to the other and regarding the material basis of something that we are used to seeing as intangible given the spread of digital technology.” [see Jiří Ptáček: Miroslava Večeřová (Discoveries), Fotograf Magazine#27] The intangible image becomes material and crust that, after the physical intervention, uncovers another layer, i.e. the water in the swimming pool, thus opening a relationship between the depicted (i.e. illusory) and the real. This was of thinking is summed up in the subtitle of Večeřová’s exhibition Positive/Negative, which took place in the Vysočiny Regional Gallery (OGV) in Jihlava in 2015 (along with Barbora Fastrová and Jana Šašková): “Nothing is as it appears: what seems solid falls apart.”

Over time, Večeřová replaced these strong gestures and disturbances with subtle and sensitive manipulation and began to expand her images into space with the aid of installation and almost sculptural interventions in which she uses materials such as stucco, textiles, sand or caramel. Her work often features everyday items and objects that she depicts in unusual contexts, thus injecting them with added significance. For instance, in the series of photographs Flying Objects (2014), items such as a squash, wooden box or fruit zest are hung on a blue background in a state of weightlessness and become aesthetic, almost abstractly operating images. After staring at them for some time we realise that these objects are lying on the surface of water in which the sky is reflected and are therefore only a kind of playful illusion. One photograph from this series became part of a joint exhibition with Romana Drdová entitled Too Soon, where it was printed on glass and hung in space, thus acquiring another level of significance and appearance. This game and the unearthing of illusion during encounters with items in their immediate surroundings is something that Večeřová shares in common with Pavel Příkaský. This was made very clear in the exhibition Double Bottom at Prague’s Chemistry Gallery, where Večeřová was the special guest and the theme was illusion and magic. It was here that the two artists introduced their joint work for the first time, comprising short videos and moving images in which the procedures of both were interwoven.

Possibly their most expressive work, which also received the most enthusiastic reception, is the short film Inner Monologue (2016), which was shown at the Drdova Gallery in Prague, at an exhibition in the SPZ Gallery, and at PAF, Olomouc, where it was nominated for the prize of Other Visions Best Moving Image 2016. In the SPZ Gallery, the video was part of a spatial installation along with images and subtle stucco work on the wall, the tactile surface of which corresponded to the overall theme of the exhibition and the content of the video. Jen Kratochvil, the curator, writes: “They encounter each other in the medium of the moving image and its manifestation in space that, in the abstract narrative line, is coming to terms with the new humanity of mankind in the digital age with the aid of a connecting up of the reality of the media/cosmetic industry and the atavistic composition of new rituals.” [see prikasky.com/inner-monologue-2/] An important role is again played by the surface in relation to physicality, fluidity, contact with material and touch, which are parts of the process of the special healing ritual. “The patient undergoes an uncertain process on the boundaries of magical ritual and art therapy. The sympathetic treatment takes place on the basis of the relations between remote and proximate objects. The fluids mingle and can represent both what takes place in the viscera and independent events exterior to the body.” [viz http://www.pifpaf.cz/cs/miroslava-vecerova-a-pavel-prikasky-inner-monologu]

Body-related processes, internal and external, also appear in the current projects of both artists, for instance the exhibition Relief at Gallery 35 m2, which again comprises a joint spatial installation combining images on canvas, photography, and an ephemeral painting of wandering viscera on the gallery walls. The crystal violet used in medicine for its antibacterial effects and applied to wounds here again corresponds to the theme being systematically developed.

The bowel as a symbol of internal processes that are always related and connected with external or superficial processes travelled the walls of the NoD Gallery, where Miroslava Večeřová and Pavel Příkaský introduced their most recent project Images That Occupy Thoughts (2017). This was more classical in style than we are used to from these artists, though with the intrusion of an entirely new element. Performers (or perhaps living sculptures) made an appearance, at first sight indistinguishable from the visitors, who sat motionless in the space, leant against the wall or held a photo with their body on the wall, thus becoming an integral part of the installation as a whole. Thanks to the ever increasing sophistication, attention to detail, and above all the dialogue between individual elements, wall painting, image, photograph, object and living sculpture, the work of Miroslava Večeřová and Pavel Příkaský is acquiring a new dimension.

Projekce: Jiné vize, 15. Festival animovaného filmu, Olomouc, 2016
Jiné vize, PAF New York, 2015
Jiné vize, PAF Seljavellir Spa, Island, 2015
Jiné vize, PAF, tAd, Texas, USA, 2015
Moving Parts: One, Locomotion Artist’s Moving Image Festival, London, 2014
Home, Curzon Cinema, London, 2007 Přednášky: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, ČR, 2015
Havering College, Essex, UK, 2014
Fakulta výtvarných umění VUT v Brně, ČR, 2014

Viktor Čech: Je ne travaille jamais, 2014 Jiné vize, Katalog PAF 2014 (online: http://www.pifpaf.cz/cs/river-miroslava-vecerova) Jiné vize, Katalog PAF 2016

Lukáš Pilka: Kde končí obrazy, Artalk.cz (online: http://artalk.cz/2017/03/09/kde-konci-obrazy/) Jiří Ptáček: Miroslava Večeřová, časopis Fotograf č. 27 (Objevy), 2016 Barbora Fastrová, Miroslava Večeřová- BARBORA A MIROSLAVA, iUmeni.cz (online: https://www.iumeni.cz/kalendar-akci/vystavy-vernisaze/barbora-fastrova-miroslava-vecerova-barbora-a-miroslava-g00219x19/) Karolina Ketmanová: Zrcadla, sklo i efemérní krajina na výstavě umělkyň v GAMU, Radio Wave, 2015 (online: http://www.rozhlas.cz/radiowave/kultura/_zprava/1485073) Radek Wohlmuth: Večeřová s Příkaským na výstavě dávají umělé dýchání umění, Hospodářské noviny, 2014 (online: http://art.ihned.cz/c1-63312430-vecerova-prikasky-karlin)