Lucia Dovičáková – The I Feel Like…
For me the visual element a là 1950s perfectly personifies the "acted" ideal of a perfect family arrangement and clearly divided roles in a relationship: the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the keeper of the family, etc. Even more than to the visuals themselves, I'm attracted to the glitz - I've read studies of how many of the housewives were able to cope with the daily, unchanging stereotype just by taking Xanax.
Lucia Dovičáková’s work has been resonating on the Slovak art scene for eighteen years, and together with the artist it has reached a clear definition of a strong authorial programme that has a woman and her image in its centre. However, she does not seek to express a universal female experience, but purposefully selects moments in which our ideas about the joys, worries, roles and ordeals of women slip into stereotypes. She treats her themes with humour and exaggeration, deftly manoeuvring on the edges of the grotesque and a parody of traditional depictions of women as objects of (male) desire, wives, mothers, professionals or housewives. She uses a number of visually and semantically potent symbols, playing with their multiple, often sensually and sexually charged, positions.
The I Feel Like... exhibition presents Lucia Dovičáková´s works from the Nedbalka Gallery collection, which reflect the main themes which have emerged in the artist’s work from her student days to the present. Dovičáková traces and comments on traditional genres and depictions of women in literature and visual culture, their tales of beauty being one of the main feminine attributes. She observes persistent gender inequalities in the division of housework, embodied in the figure of a housewife. She sensitively feels that feminism is not an outdated concept, nor any kind of retro, but a constantly updated premise for thinking about power relations in the society.
I Feel Like... is formulated in the first person because Dovičáková’s work is largely autobiographical. She notices both positive things about women but she also works with their darker, bestial sides. Her works on pregnancy and motherhood literally get under the skin with their openness and straightforward imagery. Dovičáková’s ability to transfer deep, physically and mentally demanding experiences and states onto the canvas is already visible in them. I Feel Like... is the title of a particular work by Dovičáková inviting completion. Like who/what are you feeling today?
The focus of Dovičáková's interest on woman and her image.
Lucia Dovičáková (1981) is one of the unmissable artists on the Slovak art scene. The focus of Dovičáková’s interest on woman and her image. The I Feel Like... exhibition presents Lucia Dovičáková´s works from the Nedbalka Gallery collection, which reflect the main themes which have emerged in the artist’s work from her student days to the present, divided into thematic areas: Tales of Beauty, Woman and Other Household Appliances, The Animals in Us, My Blood and Milk, and I Feel Like... Dovičáková’s paintings can bridge the gap between theory and everyday reality, between convinced (male and female) feminists and those who experience an aha-moment when looking at her works, e.g. in the form of laughter at a situation that, although it is an exaggeration, hits the essence of the problem with utter precision. It is (self-)irony and exaggeration that can be transformed into an emancipatory tool when they are in the right hands.
Some things you can enjoy only live
Address
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Galéria Nedbalka, n. o.
Nedbalova ulica 17
811 01 Bratislava
tel.: +421 2 20 76 60 31
Opening hours
- Open daily
- except Mondays
- 13.00 – 19.00
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Closed
