Klara Kristalova: Camouflage

An essential component without being literally represented in it, the landscape occupies Klara Kristalova’s mental and physical universe, without being a theme in and of itself. It is inferred in fragments from the drawings, ceramics and bronzes that populate the dark and mysterious exhibitions she has unveiled in recent years. She prefers evocation, the sensation of the landscape, to its literal representation. Selected from new productions created specially for this exhibition, the pieces first inhabited her immediate surroundings, before being installed in Paris. Her studio is located in the Swedish countryside, in the forest by a lake, North of the Stockholm region. The scenography designed with the expertise of florist Thierry Boutemy is not a faithful reconstitution, but rather an evocation of this pregnant environment that infuses Kristalova’s imagination.

In her new exhibition at Perrotin Paris, one room is dedicated to drawings, the others to the installation of her painted ceramics and bronzes. There we find hybrid characters with female bodies and heads of birds or flowers, out of scale heads, boys with flies’ wings, strange dogs, humans wearing animal masks, or yet shown in full metamorphosis