Alice Nikitinová

Though Nikitinová is of Ukrainian origin, her work has been formed within a Czech context. She works with paint, often associated with spatial and objective outputs. The clean (basic) colour scheme and thematic material is her personal development of avant-garde surface forms, whose subjects are usually based on everyday reality. In her canvases she extracts compositions from the working environment, tools or discarded objects. A continually applied mode of work with coloured surfaces that directly define the form of the painted objects gives rise to seemingly limitless series in which one or more motifs are usually repeated. The group of painting from 2006–2007 compositionally reflect figural subjects of “labour” compositions in which the artist achieves expressive stylisation on the basis of geometrised symbols of uniforms and means of transport. Later this series gave rise to an exhibition entitled “Labour” for the Nod Gallery. In subsequent years solitary items such as an ashtray, transport signs, rubber gloves or boots appeared in her paintings and objects. The painting is gradually transformed into a full-on record of an item (e.g. a cardboard box or empty notice board).

Nikitinová bases her work on a conscious acceptance of a modernist and avant-garde programme. She investigates the existing achievements of everyday life as current painterly experience. In 2011 she painted a series of pictures whose model were emptied or dilapidated areas reserved for billboards: a single colour leaf attached by straps. By means of a small shift in the illusory imitation of the shadow of a strap, Nikitinová achieved an authentic transfer into a purely painterly sphere and geometry. She often transcends this rule by the plastic processing of several surfaces to a reduced symbol of reality.

Outwardly empty but for painting the completely direct route to a coloured interface of a concrete subject continues to be important, for instance, in a series of “open books” that in a precise composition are transformed into a geometric intersection and framed within the painting.

Nikitinová’s exhibitions are indispensible. One of them was part of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, another took place in Amsterdam in the Juliette Jongma Gallery. In both of these Nikitinová transforms a group of paintings into a convincing whole. The game and its “colour calculation” (utterly explicitly in the exhibition Old School in The Hague) are the basic landmarks on the imaginary map of the installation plan. Repetitive banality occasionally enters into lines on the paintings (high voltage wires, safety pins), so as to create its own autonomous language. And, on the contrary, the readymade quality of everyday items (split tyres, a mailbox, a birdhouse) absorbs colour as an unusual intervention of the game and colour calculation.

GA2LERIE (Vaňous Petr ed. ), vydal Kulturní týdeník A2, s.r.o. jako přílohu v roce 2007

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