Klára Hosnedlová at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler / Berlin

Klára Hosnedlová
Sights #2 Fall of the Meteorites


June 16 – September 5


Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler
Kohlfurter Str. 41/43 
10999 Berlin, Alemanha


 Untitled, 2020

 Untitled, 2020 (detail)

 Overview

 Untitled, 2020 (detail)

 Untitled, 2020 (detail)

Adrian Escu, directed by
Klára Hosendlová, 
Ještěd Tower, 2019

Adrian Escu, directed by Klára Hosendlová, Ještěd Tower, 2019 

 Adrian Escu, directed by Klára Hosendlová, Ještěd Tower, 2019

 Adrian Escu, directed by Klára Hosendlová, Ještěd Tower, 2019

 Adrian Escu, directed by Klára Hosendlová, Ještěd Tower, 2019

Jaroslava Brychtová & Stanislav Libenský, Woman with a Dove, 1980, Place of Culture, Prague

All images courtesy of the artist and gallery.

Klára Hosnedlová’s realistic embroideries
explore societal pathologies as they
crystalize in modern and contemporary
design and architecture. Hosnedlová
recuperates embroidery as a contemporary, technologically mediated imagemaking process. Archetypical depictions
of femme figures captured in digital
photography are transformed through
a manual reduction of pixels. Rendered
in silky threads on canvas, their hands
and faces become a landscape of lighter
and darker tones, dissolving into the
sculptural frames made from materials
found on-site of the photo-shoot.

Each work starts with a choreographed
photoshoot in a specific site of historic
value, often in modernist architecture.
Hosnedlová’s current investigation is
the iconic architecture of 
Ještěd Tower.
Conceived by architect Karel Hubácˇek in
the 70s, the hyperboloid shape tower
was designed to naturally extend the
silhouette of the mountain it tops. Three
individual floors suspended on a steel
structure embrace the space-age motif
of the time: on the outer perimeter of
the first floor, a glazed gallery opens
directly into a spiral access ramp, leading
to the aluminum-clad interiors and a
restaurant with a panoramic view. Most
importantly, the building also houses a
radio and television transmitter, commemorated as the location of the first ‘free’
broadcast by then-president Vaclav
Havel just after the Velvet Revolution
ended in 1989. 

The tower features many original art and
design works, making it a capsule of the
sentiment of the time. The cultural
monument was added to the Indicative
List to be included in the UNESCO World
Heritage List in 2007. The title Fall of the
Meteorites is taken from one of these
artworks at the site, a monumental glass
and cement relief by artists Stanislav.

I am interested in exploring how
ornaments and design styles, as well
as fictions and fashions, give rise to
certain collective dreams or ideologies. 
Klára Hosnedlová

The mold-melted glass elements on
Hosnedlová’s recent wall objects were
produced at the company founded by
the famous glass sculpture and designer
Jaroslava Brychtová. 

Brychtová was born in 1924 in Železný
Brod as the daughter of a well-known
sculptor and developed a unique technique
of mold melting glass. At this time,
objects made of glass did not qualify as
free but applied art. Therefore, it did not
fall under the strict ideological control
system that Stalinism applied to the
cultural sector. At the age of twenty-six,
she founded the Experimental Center for
the Application of Glass in Architecture
in 1950. Three years later, she began
working with her future life and creative
partner Stanislav Libenský. Together,
they represented Czechoslovak culture
at several World Expos until their glass
sculpture The River of Life got severely
criticized by government officials for its
anti-occupation politics. Both artists
were expelled from the communist party
and the work had to be altered overnight
before its inauguration.
Their artistic legacy is still very prominent
on many public buildings, such as the 
Ještěd Tower. 

Their artistic legacy is still
very prominent on many public buildings,
such as the 
Ještěd Transmission Tower. 

Klára Hosendlová’s approach to portraiture is informed by her background in
painting, but she often crops the faces of
figures out of compositions. What’s left
resembles snapshots, playing with the
idea of the feminine mystique. The close
cropping of these images suggests the
rapid circulation and visual saturation of
the digital realm. There is something
absurd about embroidering these images,
transferring lightning-fast digital photography to the slowest medium of all.

Her work cycles are linked by an epistolary
narrative that scrutinizes facile fictions
about nostalgia, progress, and future and
how these developed from the modernist
era to the present. There are certain ways
of life, gender roles, and ideals inscribed
in interior design and architectural
spaces. Her installations investigate
the history of forms and habits that are
proposed by these spaces, as she feels
that the 20th-century avant-garde ideas
of technical solutionism and aesthetic
refinement are still very relevant today. 

Sexuality & Space is a book edited by
curator Beatriz Colomina, comprising
essays from the seminal 1990 conference
at Princeton University on gender as
addressed from within the discipline of
architecture. 

SLAVS AND TATARS | KLÁRA HOSNEDLOVÁ | AMBERA WELLMANN | GUAN XIAO 
Sights
25.05.2020–06.09.2020 

Sights is an evolving exhibition format bridging physical and online spaces. Unfolding over the next
months, works by Klára Hosnedlová, Ambera Wellmann, Guan Xiao, Florian Auer, Johannes Paul Raether,
Alexander Carver, Anna Uddenberg, Avery Singer, Pieter Schoolwerth and GCC will be the focal point
of our conversation to share multiple views and perspectives on the artists’ practices. The physical
presentations at the gallery, or at different locations all over the world, are augmented with texts,
conversations and audio-visual material that is assembled on our digital communication platforms. 

The format draws inspiration from Karen Barad’s diffractive readings, building insights predicated on
interference and entanglement. With the perimeters between on- and offline changing, we find exhibition
making tangled in biophysical, geophysical, political, economical and technological flows. Sights aims
to maintain and expand this fluid, constant movement by going beyond the object and feeding back the
odd and open ends of research into the exhibition practice. It may not dissolve the rigid frameworks
of online communication platforms or the gallery space, but it may allow us to attune ourselves during
times of fluid shifts.

Sights #1 Love Me, Love Me Not 
Love Me, Love Me Not by Slavs and Tatars features the collective’s iconic reverse mirror paintings and
dives into Slavs and Tatars’ raison d’être: publishing, regionalism and cross-culturally shared crafts
and histories of Eurasia. 

Sights #2 Fall of The Meteorites 
Fall of The Meteorites by Klára Hosnedlová features the artist’s hyper-realistic embroideries,
transforming digital images through a manual reduction of pixels looking closely into the societal
pathologies as they crystalize in modern and contemporary architecture. 

Sights #3 UnTurning 
UnTurning by Ambera Wellmann explores unsettled intimacy. The painting includes cutouts of paintings
that have been reassembled, then painted over and around. Unfolding on a vast horizontal canvas,
fragmented figures turn the gaze inside the body, creating space that resists heteronormativity and
hierarchies between different bodies.