Lucie Micíková
The Discovery of the Nest
8 July – 12 August 2016
Solo Exhibition
Opening reception: 8th July, 2016 at 7 pm
Until: 12th August, 2016
Our relation with Lucie Mičíková dates back to 2013.
Lucie applied for an internship at the gallery, as part of her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Along with her application letter she also sent a portfolio of her works.
Going through the pages, what mostly caught my attention was a wood and metal constructions on a tree, a sort of tree house – stage platform. The structure would get activated and brought to life through lectures and performances involving other students of the academy. The installation was accompanied by a beautiful “Model of construction on pizza box” and a series of drawings and collages “The Cities on the Trees”.
The drawings and the model clearly stated her interest in an ephemeral, fragile and intangible reality, that she is able to create with much delicacy and lightness. The whole project was inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel “The Baron in the Trees”. The book tells the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a 12 years old boy who refuses to follow the rules of the 18th century double-faced society. To change his faith, he decides to climb up a tree and spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom, creating his own rules.
As in the “Ville Spatiale” projects by Yona Friedman, Lucie’s idea aimed to create a vertical space dedicated to culture and exchange above the normal routine of life and society rules. This idea of a fragile, vertical reality is a recurring theme in her work.
In her exhibitions, cut out shapes of papers are often visible, while flying around in a vertical / suspended way, together with other fragments, collages, painted lines and printed surfaces, walls made of paper, pigments… Nothing in her work would suggest any idea of solidity or durability. Everything is temporary and precarious – even her collages works seem to refuse to be forced into any kind of frame or constructions. Sometimes they lie between the wall and the floor, folding between the two rigid surfaces.
At the end of her internship in Berlin she created a site-specific installation for the vitrines in the outdoor courtyard of the old gallery’s location in Skalitzerstrasse. Titled “Forgotten leaf ” the exhibition featured a series of paper “cities – nests” creating something similar to architectural landscapes and delicate scenarios.
For her show in our new location in Ritterstrasse, Lucie created a full new body of works where the “nest” is again a central theme, this time in an exaggerate enlarged scale. Several meters of folded papers overlap on each other, taking over the lower space of the gallery and connecting the two floors of the space. In the room upstair a delicate wall drawing frames the room with water, shadows, waves and lines. Finally on the second floor of the gallery, many open notebooks are placed on the floor, resembling the waves of a water’s surface, like a choppy ocean of paper.
