Try to describe the colour of pure (still) water, my dear

Under the title “Try to describe the colour of pure (still) water, my dear.” Badischer Kunstverein shows the first comprehensive presentation of works by Denisa Lehocká and Boris Ondreička in Germany. With the exhibition of these two Slovakian artists, the Kunstverein introduces two highly divergent artistic methods and confronts the sculptural and materially oriented approach of Lechocká with the language and sound-based strategies of Ondreička.

Grounded in an everyday practice of drawing, Denisa Lehocká develops and extends the traditional vocabulary of sculpture in complex spatial situations. Within a fragile equilibrium, Lehocká’s installations combine natural structures such as branches or stones with items of everyday use, as well as with graphic elements and sculptural objects. The artist translates the world of things into a system of spatial relations that seem to hold the individual elements of each constellation in suspension along the threshold between the becoming and disintegration of formal definitions. At the same time, Lehocká’s situative arrangements act as the physical traces of a continuous process of personal notation, of individual networks of material memory and speculation that are structured as narratives without telling any stories.

In contrast to Lehocká’s material- and process-based approach, the musician, author, and artist Boris Ondreička pursues a strategy of postproduction which positions his works along the borderlines between language, sound, and visuality. Specific materials are regarded by Ondreička as only one among numerous options for realizing his concepts and ideas. His works take the form of site-specific interventions which respond – aurally, textually, and performatively, as well as visually and physically – to pre-existing constellations, while at the same time displacing them semantically. His is a conceptual politics and poetry of intervention which – in its directness and immediacy – stands indisputably in the tradition of Punk, but whose concentrated dispersal of resources and systems of references just as clearly invokes the musical and literary legacies of Pop.

Despite the strikingly divergent characters of their respective artistic enterprises, Denisa Lehocká and Boris Ondreička have realized joint exhibition projects on a regular basis since the mid-1990s. In the process, they have developed a highly specific form of artistic dialogue through which the boundaries separating their oeuvres are neither blurred nor suspended, but instead continually reconstituted through a sustained praxis of mutual commentary.

Curated by Anja Casser and Daniel Pies.