EXHIBITION

Hello Stranger

Galerie Perrotin, Central District, 05/11/2016 - 06/25/2016

17/F, 50 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong

ABOUT

Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong is pleased to present “Hello Stranger”, the first solo exhibition dedicated to Swedish artist Klara Kristalova in Hong Kong, and her fifth solo show with the Gallery.

The importance of being prepared

Klara Kristalova’s first name means cope in Swedish and the individuals in her art try to cope, just as Klara herself does. The connection between her name and the verb may seem meaningless, but in fact has a very palpable charge. Klara has had to cope since a young age, and this is reflected in her art. There is reason to regard her individuals, her creatures, as messengers from her past – as refugees and migrants moulded by her hands, but most of all by her fate and her dreams, linked to her as the candle is to the flame.

Klara’s hands work the stoneware clay quickly. It’s as if she’s sketching, impulsively and immediately – only in three dimensions. When the sculptures emerge from the kiln after the first firing, blind and unseen, Klara sets to work on them with base glazes and soft brushes, as if they were delicate watercolours and not corporeal clay figures. The application of colour brings them suddenly to life, giving them expression and context (Klara has a solid background as a painter). Finally she drenches them in transparent finishing glaze, as if to cool down the intensive working process before the figures are fired again. When they emerge from the kiln a second time, they’re like strangers to Klara’s eyes: the transformation is complete, unpredictable and eagerly awaited. The ever-surprising encounters with these unknown figures are at once the price and the reward for all her toiling with heavy clay in the blasting heat from the kiln – and she copes with that too.

If Klara’s figures could speak they would find that they speak many languages, just as many refugees do. As her parents did, who made the decision to flee with Klara in 1968, when she was barely one year old and the Warsaw Pact invaded their homeland, Czechoslovakia, during what became known as the Prague Spring. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were scattered across the free nations of Europe. After several itinerant years, the young family finally settled down in an abandoned school on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, in Sweden. Some time later her mother died unexpectedly of the most ordinary of illnesses – the common cold. One day a few years later the school was gutted by fire, and the remaining family was once again bereft of everything, even though it had already lost all it had.

The greeting of the exhibition title, Hello stranger, could be directed at Klara herself, as if the things she makes with her own hands welcome her, one by one, into their circle – rootless survivors, capable, dreaming, loyal to each other and to others as only those can who have lost country and language, love and context. Those who have lost everything, but who have therefore also been able to win everything back.

A lone, human-like dog who resembles Klara is wading waist-deep through existence, seeking her flock. She pricks up her ears mid-stride and cocks her head to one side.

It was the sailor who called to the stranger. He’s jostling with the other figures who have huddled like castaways on a raft, a life raft. When the Medusa sank in the Atlantic in 1816, its corrupt commander abandoned his crew and left everyone to die on a raft. His perfidy upset the whole world, and echoes can still be heard in our era. The French painter, Théodore Géricault, painted The Raft of the Medusa in 1819, depicting the moment when the last survivors sight the Argus on the horizon – the ship that finally managed to rescue a few remaining crew members. Klara reminds us that the last corrupt commander has yet to be born.

When Ulysses, the Greek hero-king of Ithaca, returned to his island from journeys to places where no-one had gone before, his faithful dog Argus was the only one who recognised his master. Klara is like Argus, the faithful dog who recognises the figures on the raft, her masters. They are her masters, the figures on the raft, for an artist doesn’t own her works since the work masters the artist. The artist as dog.

Klara has made her odyssey, and has returned to settle near her home island, in her archipelago. Just like Ulysses, she really has a faithful dog, and they’re as close as thunder is to lightning, so the dog’s name is Zeus after the king of the gods in Greek mythology. Zeus’ attribute is a lightning bolt. 

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Klara Kristalova

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