Video: Heroes of childhood nightmares and teenage fantasies in sculptures by Klara Kristalova
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
A human figure completely hidden under a layer of white feathers, grim twins holding hands, a young girl with a keyhole on her back - these transgressive creatures inhabit childhood nightmares, dark folklore stories, and the work of Swedish artist Klara Kristalova. Her glazed figurines draw out the dark ins and outs of innocent children's fairy tales and remind of the cruel fears that accompany the bright period of growing up.
Klara Kristalova was born in Czechoslovakia, but now lives and works in Sweden. Her work is like the material imprint of the consciousness of a skeptical but curious child who has not yet fully realized where the boundaries lie between fantasy and reality. Like the heroes of bedtime stories that quietly migrate to dreams and eventually become indistinguishable from real memories, Clara's characters live in the border zone between childhood and adulthood.
“Among the other topics that I develop, an important place in my current work is occupied by various changes and transformations that happen to people during their growing up,” explains the artist. - Often my works are about girls who do different things, or experience different emotional states. Plots come to me naturally, and I am not inclined to ponder for a long time why it happens that way. In fact, my girls are people, personalities, I would even say - symbolic figures representing any person."
Currently, Klara Kristalova's work is on display at the Big Girl Now exhibition, for which the artist has deliberately selected only female characters, in response to constant questions as to why she so often portrays girls. All the heroines of this show are very different: children, teenage girls, adult women, young girls. And yet, the exhibition turned out not so much about a weak field as about a transitional period, a willingness to take a step towards something new, leaving some things in the past.
The sculptures of Klara Kristalova convey that special childish desire to be scared (if, of course, then there is someone to calm and comfort), which is expressed in the retelling of horror stories before going to bed, night forays into the cemetery or to an abandoned house and summoning all kinds of evil spirits, the desire for a still undead mind and unbridled fantasy to test reality for strength. But they also have some really minor notes. “It's hard for me to imagine happiness without sadness. If my work has no dark motives at all, it seems boring to me. And, of course, in childhood, along with the light and cheerful, there is always the dark and the eerie,”explains Klara.
Moving away from the problems of growing up, Clara Kristalova's sculptures are somewhat reminiscent of porcelain figurines by Australian artist Penny Byrne, who brings a contemporary acute social context to the traditionally bourgeois pastoral genre.
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