Denisa Lehocká

Lehocká for National Gallery, Tatra banka Donation for SNG Collections

Tatra banka as a long-standing partner of the Slovak National Gallery has supported Slovak culture again this year through a generous gift to the SNG collections. Two works by Denisa Lehocká and Peter Roller intended especially for the national gallery have come into being at this occasion.

Part of these stones (the collection displayed in the interior) will join the gallery collection, some pieces are intended for visitors. Gradually throughout the duration of the exhibition, the author will place them outside of the gallery premises. Those, who will find their (lucky) stone, can take it home with them. Petrograms are stones with sedimented memory and thus, for each finder they can represent not only a special artwork, but can also become a talisman with a riddle, or a souvenir encompassing a reference to the place where they found it. Part of the display is a collection of Roller's drawings and large-scale metal sculptures installed under the Bridging, as well as visually appealing catalogue.

Denisa Lehocká (1971) has been working for over a year to prepare a monumental wall in the SNG Atrium. On the area of 15x2.75 m, a spatial collage, visual poetry, but an absolute installation too has come into being. As usual, it is an offer to tune in, let particularities work within the whole, or to find a way which speaks to you only. But it is not like the author would not speak; on the contrary, she tries to name the world around her and also around
us very precisely. She uses “ordinary” materials and techniques–plaster, natural materials, coins, casts, textile objects, embroidery; she shapes, combines, spins, listens to the inner tension, and tunes everything together, so that the objects find their exact and right places. The resulting spatial installation Untitled is
not an autobiographical confession of the author, but a metaphor of the world and its current experiencing.