Twombly’s Fly

The exhibition series of Entrance Gallery focuses this year on young pedagogues at art schools. The artist Jitka Mikulicová (1980) leads the Painting studio at a private school Scholastika. She graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, the Studio of Intermedia Art led by Jiří David and she also studied a post-grad studies at Hoger Instituut Voor Schone Kunsten – Vlaanderen in Ghent. Jitka Mikulicová is mainly a painter but she also works with an object, installation or sculpture. The artist bases her projects on the concepts that often examine some social themes, either at a personal level (such as her work on personal memory through family archives, for example Mireček 2007) or a more general level (A Little Black Nigger Called Bu Bu, 2009).

Jitka Mikulicová has been exploring the problem of authenticity in art in contrast with the rules of artistic operation and strategies. The series of paintings exhibited at Entrance Gallery is inspired by great icons of modern painting, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly or Paul Klee. The author says she strives for a deeper understanding of the work of these artists and tries to use some of the principles they worked with in her own artistic process. Typically, she at first collects facts and real works of art and portraits of the artists and pictures that she accidentally comes across during her search on the internet. In her paintings, Mikulicová combines these elements in a form of collage. In this way, she examines and deliberately disrupts the stereotypes of superficial perception of art through the ‘stories of the famous’, she plays with the meaning and builds her own interpretations of these famous artists’ work. In one instance, she works with a painting by Richard Prince whose work (such as the series New Portraits, 2015) corresponds to themes Mikulicová is interested. She, as Prince, also searches for inspiration on the internet where she looks for the portraits of stars. However, Jitka Mikulicová uses another filter. Unlike Prince who was exploring the elasticity of authorship, Mikulicová searches for reflections of his artistic aura and fame, she lets them shine on her paintings and, with an irony, dramatizes their magnitude. Then she covers them with sediments of more visual ballast. Such ballast can be the used palettes or strokes of brush originated from repeatedly re-drawing the painting archives. It is not a coincidence that the great painters we encounter with are men. The author chooses to look at them from a certain distance – from the position of a female artist, a woman. One of the great icons is Joseph Beuys. The profile of this artists stays mostly hidden, the main element of the painting is a big hat that becomes a live structure, changes in to an object or perhaps an animal that loughs quietly…

Curated by Tereza Severová