Into Pieces

The Fragment and Torso in Visual Art
curated by Vladimíra Büngerová
group exhibition in Schaubmar's Mill in Pezinok, Slovak National Gallery

27/5/2023 - 28/4/2024

In the processual and fragile works of her project Temporary Matter (from 2019), Dana Tomečková works with powdery, slowly disintegrating sculptural and non-art materials (plaster, marble dust, cornstarch, alginate, and others). There is a contemporary art turn present in these works, moving from the solid to the ephemeral with a high dose of concentration on the exploration of material in process, space and time. Her site-specific installations both contain and absorb traces of parts of her own body. She realizes them in two sculpturally unusual ways - by casting" without water from hollow moulds or by imprints using flat moulds. This results in numerous variations of seemingly solid body fragments partly marked by instability, or loose mounds on which the trace of the body's touch lies as a natural part of the landscape. Tomečková's long-standing research is concerned with the tension between stability and instability, man and nature, the material and the immaterial, decay and extinction. The preliminary outcome of her exploration of matter, body and action alerts us to the need to expand our sensitivity to inanimate matter in times of crisis, to reorganize relationships and exclude the non-essential.

Vladimíra Büngerová, curator, SNG