ARTIST PROFILE

Pavla Malinová

  • Czech Republic (b. 1985 in Vsetín)
  • Currently in Prague, Czech Republic.

ARTIST STATEMENT

  • I am a figural painter. The figures in my paintings create ambiguous plays. They refract the world into good and bad and infinitely try to invent new forms. I use symbolism a lot; the inner one, the subconscious one. Feminine and masculine worlds intertwine into one under the robustness of my figures. I am a fucking dreamy romantic and my paintings are post-factual testimony of this age. I dream with abreast of the times; long live Imagination!

  • I believe that too much intellect and theory harms visual art. It stops to be playful. And I am a visual artist. All twentieth century is important for my work, paintings of P. Picasso, F. Léger. From the Czech Artists it is certainly Toyen, Václav Tikal, František Janoušek, the cubistic and surrealist tendencies. From the contemporary ones it is Dana Schutz a Tal R. I do not want to limit myself only to painting, but, at the moment, painting is the most crucial medium for me. I consider contemporary paining (the Czech one included) to be of a very high quality. Although we are moving in circles, we sometimes manage to get out and splash to the centre.

  • It is difficult to invent a new visual language, and particularly in figural painting. Many times I have a feeling that I paint completely clear, legible, content-focused paintings. However, people get lost in them and have their own interpretations of what is going on in them. I think that this is different from other painters. This my own interpretation of the work. I consider how my work is presented in exhibitions to be a specific from this perspective too. In fact, it became a kind of a course. I have a feeling that curators invite me as a ‘self-encompassing artist’ rather than as an introverted painter. However, I think that it is, perhaps, good like that. It opens me doors to galleries to which other painters would not have access.                              

  •  I am not a kind of artist who would draw and sketch something on her journeys all the time. Themes emerge though quick sketching, which goes precedes painting. Because I play with symbolism and forms, these drawings are important as a footing. However, I think (or re-think) the work through in the actual process of painting and I often improvise too. Working in the studio is one thing, moving the work into the gallery is another one – it determines the media I work with. In order to make exhibitions work as a one thing, I often work with installation and video. Maybe, my discontent with my painting hides behind this. Painting vanishes gradually. I look for the themes in contingency.

  • I’d be very happy, of course, if my painting did not stay only in the Czech Republic but got abroad too. In this, I perhaps do not have enough courage. I’d love to have a gallerist, who would deal with this for me. However, there are so few of them in here. I haven’t managed to get anywhere yet with this. My dream is to have a gallerist abroad too. Regarding exhibitions, I never had a shortage of those. I have a plan for every year and that too drives me (mentally) forward. This year I published a catalogue that shows my work for last four years. It is my first little fat baby. For now, I have three exhibitions planned for the forthcoming year. I follow my path slowly but, hopefully, I walk in a right direction.


For better documentation of my work, please visit the website:
www.pavlamalinova.com




BIOGRAPHY

Upcoming:

02/2019 solo exhibition in galerie Dole, Ostrava, Cz

03/2019 Group show in White & Weiss gallery, Bratislava, Sk

12/2019 solo exhibition in Krajská galerie výtvarného umění ve Zlíně, Cz


Text by Jiří Ptáček for my catalog:

You have to be careful when writing about Pavla Malinová – she has a certain built-in “anti-intellectualism.” It isn’t a petulant response to her own inadequacy, nor is it a negation of intellectualism as a sleight-of-hand trick by which a self-proclaimed elite ensures its influence on society. It is an expression of her distrust of exaggeration – and it is no coincidence that this stance is widespread on Ostrava’s art scene, where Malinová spent her formative years studying under František Kowolowski at the local university’s Faculty of Art and where she relatively quickly established herself as one of the most dynamic members of the city’s small but tenacious artistic community. In fact, the Ostrava art scene still considers her a member even after her departure for Prague – just like her peers Jan Vytiska and Pavel Ptáčník, who also moved on in the same direction. Once you are accepted in Ostrava, people will stick by you forever…

The Ostrava region is a harsh place to live. Its industrial centers suffer from a heavy environmental burden, and the divide between rich and poor is greater here than elsewhere in the country. A quarter of a century ago, the former showcase projects of the workers’ republic fell apart in the wake of the economic transformation. And even in places where the economy somehow recovered, the people did not regain their former pride. Feelings of dispossession and ruin are common here, and can be seen even among the members of the local art scene. One characteristic that Ostrava’s artists share with the typical inhabitant of northern Moravia is that they react negatively to expressions of intellectual elitism and snobbery. They don’t like it when people don’t say what’s on their mind, they are not interested in extensive scholarly apparatuses, but they appreciate it when people figure out things on their own. They like things that are rough around the edges, critical, and autonomous. In Ostrava, punk isn’t just hair-dye. Nevertheless, Malinová did not grow up among mining towers and freshly cast iron. She hails from Moravian Wallachia, a region famed primarily for its mountainous landscape and folk traditions, and her paintings show some influence from local folk ornamentation. Somewhere between Valašské Meziříčí, Ostrava, and Prague it all fused into the position we have been discussing here – a position that determines the character of her artistic production as well.

Pavla Malinová is not the kind of person who plans an entire series of paintings in advance. She paints without longer interruptions, and her approach grows organically from each particular painting. She continues to repeat a motif until its current possibilities have been exhausted. In 2015, one such element was a central composition, sometimes developed into a diagonal x-shaped cross along the entire surface of the canvas whose massive arms pushed the human figures to the very edges of the painting, forcing them into contorted and painful-looking poses. At the time, Malinová liked to work with dark colors such as deep browns and saturated reds. She had the people in her paintings engage in mysterious acts, subjected them to the strain of burdens constructed from color gradients, or forced them into yoga positions. Some of her paintings, such as The Architecture of Energy, Vision of Hallucination, or Paranormal Bums, made references to the realm of spiritual experience, visions, esoterica, or religious practices. By the next year, she gradually abandoned the motif of the cross and arrived at the center of the painting as the focal point of the composition using other means. And although we can say that her focus on the aforementioned spiritual content was somewhat less pronounced, there was no clear point after which it could not return (and it has).

The organic nature of her artistic evolution rules out any clear division of her career into a “cross period,” a “labyrinth period,” or a “keyhole period” – the last of which took the place of the human figure in most of her paintings from 2017 and allowed her to work with several layers of view arranged one above the other. Although the time when she briefly stopped painting and worked with drawing instead seems important in retrospect (since drawing clearly helped to strengthen her ability to use lines in contrast to the painterly approach to two- and three-dimensional objects and significantly expanded her range of motifs while also brightening her palette), she has essentially remained true to her basic approach in which she emphasizes the need to not think ahead but to leave room for instinct – not just when working on primitive sketches, but also during the actual process of painting.

Her works remind us of ancient and non-European art, but they could only have been created in the second decade of the 21st century. They are metallurgical alloys of subjective pictograms, visions molded from the visual plurality of the internet and from encoded personal reflections, a mixture of symbols with unstable, fluid and moody meanings whose seriousness is counterbalanced by barbed humor that tones down the pathos of ancient myths. How else can we see the painting Smack! (2018) but as an image of two robust figures just before they bump into each other with the soft tissues of their buttocks?!

In fact, the human body is the central theme of Malinová’s work. We saw it in her older paintings, where it was subjected to external pressures and stresses in ambiguous intersections of physical forms of spiritual exercises and painful dislocations. But the body is also found in her most recent paintings, such as her allegory of interpersonal relations (Spiderweb, 2018), her satire of male sexuality (Teenieweenie, 2018), and her meditation on illness (Scoliosis, 2018), or as a reflection of the billowing energetic force of human beings (Power!, 2018). Entering into Malinová’s paintings means first admitting that they relate to external pressures and inner tensions, mental strains and spiritual stresses, and their physical resonance on the farthest horizons of the indivisible unity of body and mind, facts and feelings. In a certain sense, her paintings are post-factual because they related to the world without any objectivizing perspectives; in a way, they are non-methodological, wafting in a storm of emotions and inconstant symbols, imaginatively flirting with magic and the excitement of removing the hyphen between “inner” and “outer.” Her paintings depict the human personality as the focal point of a powerful flow of information that cannot be reasonably directed but that nevertheless must somehow be dealt with. Pavla Malinová’s paintings possess a sense of urgency; they are like a safety valve for releasing excess pressure, but during this process they also “condense” (the way steam condenses into water) into symbolic “relationshapes” that are exciting precisely because they are not created as representations of standardized systems but as bold and honest proposals for how to comprehend the confusing situation of de-hierarchized space-time to which we are subjected. They are an expression of a paradigm shift that we not just feel is necessary but that is clearly already happening – and the only way we have of describing its topology through poetry.