Markéta Souhradová: Beyond the Horizon
of the Landscape
28. 1. – 21. 2. 2021
curator: Gabriela Kotiková
How do we perceive and experience our landscape? What is hiding beyond the horizon? We look around us, and our view determines the flow of our thoughts. Winter landscape that will soon start to turn green. The landscape is awakening, transforming in time, during individual seasons. City landscape; landscape transformed by man. Imaginary landscape. Fragments of memories revive places in our hearts. Childhood landscape with our first adventures. Horizon of events, images of nature.
Markéta Souhradová created the installation Beyond the Horizon of the Landscape for the Jelení Gallery in Prague which was inspired by her longing to walk through landscape and let herself be carried away by her images and thoughts. Her work captures the landscape’s footprints depicted with the help of experimental drawing and objects from colourful as well as raw materials.
The artist’s personal record of the landscape is her dialogue with the landscape near her home. Walking through a whispering forest, freezing and the subsequent thawing of ice, wood fallen in the forest, dried branches on trees, uncut grass on a meadow, harvesting fruit, cooking, cleaning the home and the garden, crackling fire.... The captured moments are intertwined with the reality of the daily life and its responsibilities. All the poetic processes that are expressed through abstract use of materials – wood, brick, icing sugar, rock covered with moss, wrapping paper, ink with salt – transform the viewer physically and mentally back to the artist’s home, as well as to the art installation.
Markéta Souhradová’s fragile drawings illustrate the disappearing horizon of the landscape in the sharp glare of the sunlight or the piercing white light of fresh snowfall. She formed outlines of landscape on large formats of brown wrapping paper using a saline solution and black ink mixed with salt. The horizon of the landscape illusively opens to new imagines when we step forward. And upon returning home it closes, concluding the cycle. The process repeats itself, but the images and perceptions constantly change.
Markéta Souhradová (*1989) is a young Czech artist who had focused on spatial artwork already during her studies in the studio of Jiří Kovanda at the Faculty of Fine Art and Design at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. She has had long-term focus on site-specific or processual installations and spatial artwork, which aim to attract the perception of the viewers, their imagination and experiences with the perception of a visually colourful world. She creates imaginative landscapes, scenes, and situations that open the viewer’s perception and personal imagination. Her work is distinguished by its minimalistic aesthetics, sense for detail and elegance, but at the same time by the raw materials used in individual elements – objects in her installations. In her most recent installations, we can also come across the media of photography or objects from daily use. We can see certain fascination inherently dedicated to natural materials and the unstoppable process of time in all of Markéta Souhradová’s work. She examines the perception and transformation of outer and inner landscapes, reflections of fleeting memories and unique moments that we experience in nature or in industrial landscape.
Adéla Machová & Markéta Souhradová
(transl. Vanda Krutsky)
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7, GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Partners: Kostka stav
Media support: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, UMA: You Make Art
