Kristína Kandriková — The Viewer’s Movement

Her last exhibition (with Viliam Slaminka) was held in Brno in the autumn. It was a result of the OFF/FORMAT Gallery’s project titled VýTěr 2017. It brought the two artists together with a local curator Jan Gerych. Their collaboration has brought fruits and the tandem of the Slovak artist and Czech curator will present again at Nitra Gallery’s Bunker. 

The focal point of Kristína’s work lies in the light and colour qualities of her paintings, right on the edge of the image. She is willing to give up her personal handwriting in order to make her works more object-oriented. She has rarely framed her works and she has not necessarily relied solely on 2D imagery. Her works often worked only in interaction with their surroundings, a supplementary image or relied on the viewer’s movement and point of view. The artist has probably managed to incorporate all physical properties of coloured light. 

After a year of freelancing, she is ready to announce her work has merged with her life. She no longer makes large differences between her studio work and other activities. She has dived so deep into her artistic research that it has produced a new theme – balance: “It is about our constant search for balance and how to maintain it and the tension of decision making.”
The artistic experiment has become the reality of her life and she no longer balances just within the merits of art, but as a freelance artist, she also has to balance her own fate. 

Kristína’s initial tries seemed artificial, pure, post-human. However, they have always included an underlying natural component. Overtime, it has surfaced and become the artist’s another key theme. She has incorporated natural material that remains alive under the paint and tries to get through. The landscape motive that is reflected in her horizons focuses on contrast and acquaintance. Our goal is to get to the horizon, but we can never reach it. Once we finally get there, we blend in and our presence denies it at the same time. It is a perfect metaphor of artistic avant-garde and Kristina’s own work as well. She was not satisfied with her original themes and once she has reached her dissolving horizon, she started looking for another one immediately. And that is why it is so fascinating to follow her on her journey.