When you switch off the dark, you will meet a hepta-gold dragon

Marie Hladíková created a world of her own: a disquieting countryside stretching behind the enchanted root where fog settles. Wanderers may only get there following precise instructions. But even when they get there, they cannot be certain whether they will not come back enchanted or bewitched.
“When you switch off the dark, you will meet a hepta-gold dragon” is a name of installation where Marie continues uncovering other magical sceneries of an undreamt-of continent as she already did in her exhibitions in Prague last year when she turned gallery premises into untrodden mountain valleys or impenetrable marshlands. As in the exhibition in collaboration with Anders Grønlien in the Chodov Fortress under the title “Walk three times around the mountain and the night will be yours” or in her solo exhibition “Look for an anti-gem and await a hepta-gold dragon deep in the woods” in the 35m2 Gallery, also now it is necessary to complete a task in order to achieve the desired aim.
Marie Hladíková, who studied at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of sculpture of Kurt Gebauer, has radically changed the style that was long typical for her. Her previous work was dominated be figures and figurines of strange anthropomorphous beings: cute, indeed, but at the same time hurt and injured with little hope of recovery. They came from a different world that might have rejected them and they seemed to be suffering in our world. But they are history now.
Just like these beings were forced to leave their own homeland, Marie has been forcing viewers to leave their homelands behind at the threshold of the gallery. She leads viewers into unfamiliar places in the kingdom of somnolent nature. Viewers sense they are not “at home” here. Their experience has nothing to build on, but the effort to get oriented – rethink own coordinates – produces the crucial sensation: a realization which could counterbalance if the hepta-gold dragon did not eventually show up.
Text by Pavel Turek