Margita Titlová: Vertical Purple 15. 2. 2023 – 14. 5. 2023
Curator: Magdalena Juříková
Margita Titlová is one of the most prominent representatives of the 1980s generation. While still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts (studies 1977–1983), she was looking for a way to find themes and expressions that would free her from the stereotypes of the instruction of the time, marked by the ideological demands of the Communist regime.
She became interested in conceptual art and performance. For her research she chose to confront her own body with geometric and force fields in the open air and later also indoors (1980–1982). She was exploring what her physical presence was causing in these relationships.
Through actions in which she intensely defined her shadow with an outline drawing (1984–1985), she arrived at monumental touched works on paper, in which she used lipstick (1982–1983). Later, she enriched their completely abstract structure with additional colors and added signs, which, however, were not derived from any known source and came purely from her own imagination. (1984–1989). These giant drawings gradually broke out of the classical format and formed irregular shapes, layered on top of each other, which were partially being destroyed in the overflow of creative fervor and energy that became Titlová’s hallmark in the following years. Thanks to this that Titlová often very quickly leaves behind her “conquered territories”, plunging into new experiments in which everything changes – from forms and genres to materials and the content.
She works with installations in which she explores a wide range of themes that on the one hand have analytical starting points, but often end up referring to the transcendent, or to energies that we are able to transmit without being able to see and define them. She tries to record and interpret them using various technologies. She works with the Kirlian photography device in order to transform the objects of her interest by this electromagnetic method (Bardot Women, 1991), “rewriting” the real image on the basis of electrical coronal discharge. The aim is observation rather than a definitive work. The series then ends with an abstract recording of the hectic movement of her hand, thus capturing energy in its pure form.
She uses both simple and banal means (What Angels Have Forgotten, 1995), as well as various physical principles such as magnetism or the refraction of light in an optical prism. At the same time, she has increasingly focused her attention on light, which figures as an important component in many installations as well as paintings, where the spectrum transmitted to the surface by reflection is an integral part of the image and its pictorial treatment (1997–1999). In addition to completely abstract works, she deals with historical memory – personal, reinterpreting photographs from the family archive in various ways, or expanding this memory and directing our attention on women who have each made history in their own distinctive way (Icons, 2010). She works in an unconventional way with photography, capturing the manipulated spectral reflection of light in her images, with thermal imaging, in front of which she performs and invests her own bodily energy in the image, or she draws on the wall with the help of substances of different thermal properties, recording through thermal imaging the combination of everything that happens in the scene in front of the camera (2008–2010).
At present, she seeks to synthesize all the methods, now intimately and honestly tested, and works with them with a sense of freedom and relaxation that she enjoys because of the bravura with which she has gradually mastered them for the benefit of her thematic interests.
