Romana Drdová

Romana Drdová graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She most often works with objects, photographs or installations, and finds inspiration outside the visual arts, especially in fashion, design, new technologies and marketing. She works with light, transparency and the human body with a highly refined aesthetic of pure forms and a minimalist palette of colours, and places a dividend on textures.

In her early works, Drdová focused on the conceptual interrogation of photography as medium. Her black-and-white pictures in Slope of 2012 deploy references to avant-garde morphology and aesthetics, and a year later at the exhibition Blue/White (Gallery Kostka, MeetFactory, 2013) she added blue and white fluorescent lamps that participated in the creation of the image and shifted it from the medium of photography in the direction of spatial installation. Following this, in the collective exhibition Pocitová teplota / Emotional Temperature (Prádelna Bohnice, 2014) the artist forswore photography altogether. Her interest in working with space, photographs and structures was given a boost by a research fellowship at the studio of experimental textiles at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM), which amongst other things led her to investigate materials and fashion. She approaches fashion designs with a sculptural sensitivity using which the human psyche can be shaped via physicality. This is bound up with Drdová’s reflections upon bodily defence, as well as how it can be improved or impeded by means of various different aids. The beginnings of these considerations are clear in projects such as Smogový kšilt / Smog Visor (Mica, UMPRUM, 2014), which is intended to protect its wearer against attacks by an overwhelmingly visual environment.

Her fascination with textures is backed up by an interest in mirrors, glass and other reflective surfaces. She interrogated their ability to disrupt and absorb the surrounding space in her semester project involving several mirrors leaning against each other Locomotion at the photography studio (UMPRUM, 2014). In dialogue with the photographer Vladimíra Večeřová she develops the theme more deeply at the exhibition Too Soon (GAMU, 2015), where she has a delicate material float along the sharp edges of the stairwell as a fluid mass, or experiments with the semblance of levitation and the creation of tension when an almost invisible nylon fibre is weighed down by glass. In the installation Pohled / View (Veletržní palác, NG, 2015) she also responds to a specific space, this time the original presidential lounge of Veletržní palác. Using glass and reflections she enters into a relationship with the dominant facade of the building and draws the viewer’s attention from the unique view toward the monumental foyer in the interior. However, above all this work places the viewer face to face with an unexpected optical game involving perspective and perception.  

The artist’s attempt to comment on branding and the apparent individualisation availing itself of shrewd marketing claims relates back to personalised fashion requirements. In Water Self (2016) she designed a set of identical bottles of clean water with attractive packaging and effective copywriting in order to evoke a credible illusion of the original signature brand, and criticised marketing mechanisms by means of its functional appropriation. The narcissistic tone and interest in confronting the viewer with an unexpected situation was intensified by the very form of implementing a project as part of the exhibition held in the Jakoby fashion boutique. Drdová finally places the way she herself dresses on the level of her art. 

As well as clearly articulated positions, Drdová offers less concrete forms that represent a joint cold abstract aesthetic creating mood by means of more or less randomly combined material compositions. Such, for instance, was Intuitive Gradient (Galerie K.art.on, Karlin Studios, 2015), which operated on the boundary of imagined and concrete associations, real objects and their reflections. What had been until then an austere colour scheme was expanded to take in expressive tones of neon yellow and pink, which can be seen as a reference to current design trends. Again we find ourselves on the narrow boundary between fine art and applied art. Drdová leaves these to interact and merge and consciously refers to both spheres without argumentation or an aesthetic failure. 

As well as the world of the advertising industry and contemporary social networks of carefully stylised situations, Drdová seeks inspiration from the modesty of Asian cultures. This approach is clear in the work of fashion relics of the future entitled Profoundly Human, which she presented at an exhibition of the House of Fashion (Gallery Hraničář, 2016). She deals comprehensively with the topic in her solo exhibition Writing without Bones (Futura Contemporary Art Gallery, 2017), in which futuristic visions of the fashion industry and the future of medicinal prosthesis are developed in connection with the general dictates of beauty and health on human skeletal remains. In what is a harmonious exhibition in terms of material and colour, the body and its parts become products, the presentation of which as derived from commercial photography is frighteningly cold and depersonalised. In an expanded concept of corporeality, Drdová records the influence of human physiology while striving for a balanced response located somewhere between the experimental laboratory, Zen garden and the commercial window display.

Články:

2017,
Michal Novotný: Portfolio, In: Art & Antiques, No 9, září 2017, s. 32
Dita Malečková, http://artalk.cz/2017/05/22/cjch-2017-special-romana-drdova-pohled-overlook/
2015
Karolina Ketmanová, Radio Wave https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/zrcadla-sklo-i-efemerni-krajina-na-vystave-umelkyn-v-gamu-5215083
Veronika Čechová, Artikl http://artikl.org/galerie-evolucni/svet-za-sklemRozhovory:

2017
Matěj Samec, Radio Wave https://wave.rozhlas.cz/finalistka-chalupeckeho-romana-drdova-kazdy-ma-pravo-jit-po-ulici-s-tim-ze-svuj-5964704
Jiří Ptáček http://jiriptacek.blogspot.cz/2017/08/lucie-romana-drdovy-nejsme-pouze-sestry.htmlReportáže:

2013
Red 8, kurátoři: Tereza Jindrová a Jen Kratochvíl, Galerie UMPRUM, Praha, http://artycok.tv/19289/red8