Denisa Lehocká — Untitled

Three paper collages/assemblages by Denisa Lehocká entered the collections of the Nitra Gallery in 2022 (two as a gift and one by direct purchase from the author). The aim of the acquisition was to add a respected artist to the Gallery’s collection who had not been represented in the Nitra Gallery’s collection. The author’s paper collages bear distinctive elements of the unique aesthetic characteristic of the artist, who is one of the internationally established ones of the distinctive generation of the 1990s. Her work is based on a non-figurative, biomorphic, (post)minimalist language of contemporary art. Time and its inner experience, and consequently its visual records, play a significant role in her work – if there is such a thing as ‘intuitive intimate causality’, this is one of the verbalized feelings one can experience when perceiving Denisa Lehocka’s work.

“How do I know Denisa Lehocká isn’t crazy? How do I know that making words out of stones, sticks, paper, plaster, string, gauze, pearls and ink is art? That it can in no way be associated with women’s pastimes? That Lehocká doesn’t waste her time applying drops of paint? How do I know that the determination with which the artist takes up her pencil every day to draw, and the obstinacy with which she insists on making innumerable, almost identical casts, and the tenacity with which she adds one little thing to another until there are not enough to bind them into larger sentences-how do I know that all this restlessness is more than mere imitation of processes?” (Ruth Noack)

These questions, in various paraphrased variations, are probably asked by most people when they first encounter Denisa Lehocká’s work. At first glance, her work is illegible (and does every work of art have to be legible?), but it is not self-evident. Her visual language carries elements of childlike playfulness, but the unbridledness of childlike expression is not very often found in the artist’s approach. Her work is rationally rigorous (analytical?).

Through coincidence, on closer examination, we notice the precision of the execution, and at the same time we get the feeling whether her work fits somewhere, and whether its meaning is not something much more than what we see at first glance.

The viewer’s experience and harmony with the specific installation site becomes important. 

At first glance, Lehocká’s infantile work activates our senses and trigger questions: what kind of art is it? The artist’s visual language goes beyond what we normally think of meaning and artistic motivations. What is important is the artist as part of nature’s creative process. ‘Nothing more’ than a primary interest in the simple physical and chemical processes to which natural materials are subject. Is this a (post)conceptual creation? Lehocká’s spatial collages carry elements of organic abstract sculpture. In her work we feel the slow passage of time to the point of an imaginary ‘stuck in the moment’. The organic presence/slowness is complemented/disturbed by visual minimalism and various associations. Her work is full of ambivalent question marks that swirl in the mind after reception.