Kateřina Vincourová

Kateřina Vincourová belongs to the first generation of prominent artists to enter the Czech art scene in the 1990s. The newly acquired artistic and civil freedom had a strong impact on the art of the first decade after the Velvet Revolution. This period of experimentation was characterised by work with new media, as well as with materials that had been neglected in the Czech Republic until then. It was these that Vincourová began to use in impressive, mostly monumental installations and sculptural objects, created from different variations of plastic materials such as rubber, plastic, foam, polyester, PVC, etc. Due to their short half-life, these works have become a hot topic in the restoration of synthetic materials. Since the beginning of her creative career, Vincourová has developed two parallel lines of work. Through the first, socially critical position, she expresses herself regarding topics that are socially still relevant. The second, intimate position focuses on more universal human themes and emotional experiences inherent in each of us.

After an internship at the Surikov Academy in Moscow, Vincourová began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1988. At the end of 1989, under the new leadership of the rector Milan Knížák, the Academy underwent a turbulent transformation and attempted to transform itself from a traditionally conservative school into a Western-style institution. During her studies there, Vincourová tried out many possible styles of teaching and creating art in several different studios: from the traditional graphic studio, via Knížák’s intermedia studio, to a similarly focused studio run by the performance artist Miloš Šejn.

During her studies, she began to exhibit independently in established galleries, such as Brno’s Na bidýlku, where she presented her work Nadchleby in 1991. She used bread (chleb) as a material, and a year later she worked with grey painted foam in an installation responding to stereotypical ideas entitled Neděle / Sunday, which she created for the Béhémot Gallery in Prague. In 1995, she became more widely known thanks to her site-specific installation at the Nová síň gallery. In the psychedelically coloured and darkly phosphorescent dream space Untitled, she created three mobile dwellings with associations of children’s dens and hiding places, or rather ideas about them. Viewers could enter this otherworldly, strange world with its soft floor, barefoot and enjoy an unusual intimacy in a public space, thus being drawn into the game being played out and becoming active participants.

The following year, in 1996, Vincourová became the first female winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. In 1999, she was awarded a DAAD scholarship, which brought her to the attention of an international audience. In the latter half of the nineties, when enthusiasm for the end of totalitarianism reached its peak, Vincourová embarked on a critical reflection on rampant consumerism and ubiquitous advertising and commerce, as well as on the technologies that were interfering on a huge scale in the life of the whole of society. One of the most famous installations from this period is Malibu Airways (1998), created from inflatable bottles of the relevant alcoholic beverage left over from the company’s advertising campaign. A year later, a similar scene played out. This time round, the installation Call featured an inflated plastic cell with tentacles, on the ends of which were, again, inflated mobile phones. Although at first glance both installations look comical (like everything that change scale ad absurdum), Vincourová never works with humour and wit. Her works are – perhaps to the chagrin of an age that revelled in jokes and politically incorrect humour – as serious and dry as the messages transmitted through them.

Monumental, literally empty symbols of contemporary life, whether represented by foreign goods, telephones, or, as in other installations, inflated giant shopping bags (Tašky / Bags, 1999), served Vincourová as a means of critiquing the superficial and alienated but comfortable way of life of Western civilisation, which our post-communist society has enthusiastically joined with all the joy of material pleasures. The 2002 installation Noví hrdinové / New Heroes can be seen as the culmination of a certain creative phase. In the Jiří Švestka Gallery, a group of larger-than-life representatives of our world in the form of a carrot, a light bulb, a mobile phone and toothpaste gathered around a plastic campfire.

In addition to the social criticism enshrined in eccentric, visually appealing and easy to understand works, Vincourová also delves into more intimate themes through the metaphorical materialisation of micro-stories, which, however, retain a more universal relevance. One of the earliest such works was the installation Z lásky / From Love (1994–1995), featuring a non-wearable wedding dress made of plastic phosphorescent toys and PVC on which lamps shone. These were switched on and off at three-minute intervals. For Vincourová, the incarnation of the universally accepted symbol of love represented a coming to terms with stereotypical ideas, dreams and desires.

She resumed working with these themes many years later, after a creative hiatus of five years. Whereas previously she had to create her works in cooperation with the Fatra Napajedla factory, she now made do with small scale materials commonly available in haberdashery, from zippers, buttons, elastics and pins, to pieces of bras, shorts, garters or suspenders. From these materials, combined with wooden and glass elements, she began to create fragile, de-materialised drawings in space and objects associated with human bodies or their individual parts, thanks also to the colourfulness of the objects from the tailoring industry. Here, too, there is the occasional inflated object, most often round, wrapped in fabric or net.

She first introduced her newfound interest in depicting an often sexualised corporeality to the public in 2011 at an exhibition at the Jiří Švestka Gallery. The tendency to dematerialise and minimise the objects used prevailed, and in the following years became as typical for her as had been inflated consumer goods. This approach could also be observed in the exhibition Kdykoliv si řekneš / Whenever You Say You Will at the Fait Gallery in Brno in 2016. Here, too, tailoring elastic supplemented with plastic combs appears in one of the main roles. Alongside this, however, the artist filled the gallery space with other objects, in which she works with the principle of illustration and depicts directly the feelings she wants to evoke in the viewer.

Although it may not seem so at first glance, Vincourová’s recent works are also intrinsically related to those of the 1990s. She is still looking at the same theme, i.e. the human psyche and its reaction to external stimuli and lived experience, which is universal in nature. It doesn’t matter whether the stimulus is the world of advertising and Coca-Cola, or the experience of motherhood, or the loss of a loved one. The intensity of the message in Vincourová’s work remains the same: only the mode of its actual expression has changed under the influence of the course of life.

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.