Denisa Krausová - A Burning Potato
16. 2. - 23. 4. 2017
Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava
Masaryk Square No. 24, Jihlava
curator: Petr Kovář
Opening: 16. 2. 2017 at 5pm, Introduction: Petr Kovář, Musical performance: Kolegyně korále
Denisa Krausová - A Burning Potato,
Denisa Krausová is a local artist, a graduate of Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology, who specialises in still-life paintings.
The name of the exhibition „A Burning Potato“ is supposed to remind us of something familiar, close – a potato as one of the basic parts of our diet, not that long ago also a symbol of the Highlands region; soil, earthiness, potatoes baked in ash and with it the romanticizing allusion of the general history and even our personal memories; but there’s also „a hot potato“, coming from the Czech idiom „to keep tossing something like a hot potato“, meaning something we don’t know how to deal with so we try to pass it on. But this particular potato is literary burning! And that’s where all warm feelings of familiarity end. The supposed understanding of a familiar situation is disturbed, pushed to the periphery. The suggested incompleteness of action contributes to this – not the burnt potato itself but the actual burning, the flame of a transforming change.
That’s also how the work of Denisa Krausová could be described. She puts this uncertain, ever changing presence of burning to the seemingly static and undisturbed scenes of still lifes with fruits and flowers. And because this doesn’t correspond with our general knowledge about still lifes, we are made to take more time viewing her work, to think over what we already know.
