Klara Kristalova Wild Thought — Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 8 → October 27, 2012

New ceramic works in small and medium sized formats as well as two sculptures in bronze patina Deer, 2012 and Girl with flower, 2011 will be exhibited.

After studying painting at the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden, Klara Kristalova dedicated herself to ceramics among other disciplines. Its characteristics, along with the concrete possibilities of being able to work this material rapidly while combining it with astonishing colours and three-dimensional shapes, fascinate Klara Kristalova who uses ceramics to create a fantastic and sometimes disturbing universe. As the artist explains:

“I needed to find my own language to share with others. An obvious and simple language that in some way could be universal.”

Kristalova’s universe, inspired by the popular imagination of Northern Europe, the tradition of fairy tales and the observation and direct contact with nature, is peopled with solitary figures, often young girls and animals (hares, donkeys, birds, peppered moths) and chimera that are half way between the Animal and Plant Kingdoms. These characters, who are at once pure and disruptive, evolve in an oneiric world between dream and nightmare.

Rather than featuring myths or relying on an immediate symbolism, the artist plays upon the ambiguity and ambivalence of her figures, suspended between innocence and danger, beauty and repulsion, attraction and fear. The gracious and striking aspect of her sculptures, covered with a bright varnish in fact recall the world of childhood, haloed with an aura of mystery and strangeness.

Her icons (a man with a donkey’s head, tree-women, young girls with faces covered with butterflies and birds or drowning in black puddles) emerge from her unconscious, translate her emotions and thus possess a fascinating and impenetrable power.