Venus, Street, Palm, Bone…

Martina Rötlingová’s (1987) first solo exhibition at Youth Gallery focuses on the theme of women heroes. Even the title itself paraphrases the grammatical models of female nouns used in Slovak language. 

The artist often draws inspiration from her own experience while painting the position of a woman (women) and their perception in today’s narcissistic world. Sometimes her images are based on real historical heroines and their past depictions in art. Her paintings and objects respond to today’s ideal of beauty as perceived by our society. Through her realistic paintings, but also various everyday objects, she evaluates the way it is created, shaped by commercials, media and social networks (including dating sites). She re-interprets historical depictions of women using today’s ideal of beauty. She also reflects upon the rising popularity of texting/sexting. 

 Her work focuses on women’s interest in their own (self)valuation, (self)love, (self)control, (self)destruction. Venuses, women, heroines, characters and their historical stories are, according to Rötlingová, in many ways interconnected and similar to the life struggles (despairs) of contemporary heroines which are reshaped by the society’s demands and expectations. 

The exhibition thus features several very vivid features which are very perceptible and interpretable upon glance (various motives of ontological uncertainty, cognitive dissonance, ego, narcissistic behaviour, madonna-mistress syndrome, texting, sexting, selfies, social media, reflections, body, corporeity, Venuses, heroines and victims, profound differences between reality and illusion). Everything mentioned is related to each other. Our current mainstream society keeps sexualising women so they are primarily perceived as sexual objects with repressed personalities. Through various images of quick impersonal satisfaction offered by a consumer-focused society. At the same time, we are becoming co-creators of a world generating various realities, some of which could be based on lies and overly high expectations causing anxiety and uncertainty about the world and ourselves. As individuals, we keep getting more disconnected from each other, from our core self, just so we could connect easily online and have unreal opportunities of being someone else, with a new identity and new reality where we could (dream and) conspire about ourselves. 

Her appropriations of historical themes, but also the actual works offer us the opportunity to read into their intended purpose – to find similarities and differences and to become aware of our inability to understand the world, and all of this in 50 shades of very peri and pink. She uses the traditional medium of painting to analyse our perfectly “crooked” world with the techniques of hyperrealism and trompe l´oeil, erasing the border between the public and private.