Center for Contemporary Arts Prague
www.fcca.cz 2006–2024
She focuses on sculpture in her works. She views this as an area for exploring primary questions of the interior and exterior, permanence and impermanence. The artist uses possibilities afforded by time and motion. The results of her work represent more or less temporary installations, whose existence often depends on the given place and viewer participation. A number of Vincourová’s works represent interiors within an interior (galleries), or an image within an image. These interiors are sometimes inhabitableor at least show metaphorical signs of inhabitability („Call ...“, Bags/Tašky). Most often they involve models of consumer culture objects (mobile or cell phones, etc.). The artist comments on the fact that people live inside things, more exactly inside goods. So we are not speaking here of phenomenally-acquired/held things. On the contrary, the object of consumption owns its user to a certain degree. The object creates a battleground, an observation space and a jail cell. Consumers shut themselves into daily rituals, whose repetition and supply melds into a compact, grey space („Neděle/Sunday“). These consumable stashes bring to mind space modules with limited room for life. They are metaphors of expansion and closure. Vincourová’s objects are filled with air (inflated) – with the help of ventilators, which represents their construction material. The external skin (layer) is a space for promoting (drawing attention to) a specific design: logos. This type of fluid architecture has, as a consequence, an elementary softness of its objects. This allows for their simple shifting and transformation. This softness does not however mean loss of form. Rather with its help she emphasises the visual quality of the surface, its symbolic role. Classical statuary art focused on the inside structure and the fixed volume, underscoring its desire for eternalness and timelessness. Even consumer objects demand a certain immortality, of course, in the rhythm of an eternal return and unending variability. The consumption time is a cyclical time, a time of ritualised events. Vincourová’s objects react to this artificial idyll, which has radically transformed the shape of privacy. Privacy has become a commodity, whose concrete form one can select from a catalogue. The public space (above all commercial space) becomes a „soft“ environment, calling to mind the interior of a child’s room. Vincourová is fully aware of this aspect of consumption culture and works to create its ambiguous model.
Studium:
1988–1994
AVU Praha, Ladislav Čepelák, Miloš Šejn, Milan Knížák
Stáže, tvůrčí pobyty:
1998–1999
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito
1986–1988
Moskevský státní akademický umělecký institut V. I. Surikova, Moskva
Stipendia:
1999–2000
Berlin DAAD
1998
Headlands Centre For Art, California
Ocenění:
1996
Cena Jindřicha Chalupeckého, Praha
1993
Alexander Dorner Prize, Hannover
1997
Kateřina Vincourová, Nakladatelství Divus, 1997
2014
Johana Lomová, Nechat věci plynout, rozhovor s Kateřinou Vincourovou, Art Antiques, 2014, 26-31
2005
Tomáš Pospiszyl, Hrdinové moderní doby, Ateliér, 2005, 1
1997
Karel Císař, Kateřina Vincourová, Labyrint revue, 1997, 33, 119-125
1996
Marek Pokorný, Kateřina Vincourová, Nová síň, Detail, 1996, 24
1994
Marta Smolíková, Jako když jdeš a najednou šlápneš do vody, rozhovor s Kateřinou Vincourovou, 1994, 90-93
1993
Věra Jirousová, Šedá v šedém, Ateliér, 1993, 1, 1