A Lover's Discourse:
Stanislava Kovalcikova
& VALIE EXPORT

The final presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features two new paintings by artist Stanislava Kovalcikova (b. 1988, Czechoslovakia) that she has chosen to present alongside a 1971 film by legendary video and performance artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Austria).

Following her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the mentorship of Peter Doig and Tomma Abts, Kovalcikova recently initiated The White Ermine, an independent project space for contemporary art, alongside her Düsseldorf-based studio practice. Experimentation in exhibition-making and the vocabulary of display are an important part of Kovalcikova’s approach to painting: for her solo exhibition at Belvedere Museum in Vienna (2023), the artist displayed her works within a dimly lit, monochromatic atmosphere in tones of ochre, while for her solo presentation at Art Basel (also 2023), she transformed the art fair booth into the architectural environment of a waiting room, hanging her paintings inside medical cabinets.

For her show at the Aspen Art Museum, Kovalcikova approaches the gallery as a cave-like environment in which the projection of VALIE EXPORT’s black-and-white film Facing a Family provides the sole source of light. Kovalcikova’s paintings are illuminated by this glow. EXPORT’s groundbreaking short piece represents an early example of interventions by artists into mainstream European television and shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV together while eating dinner. Originally broadcast on Austrian network television in February 1971, Facing a Family was seen by middle-class families much like the one in the artwork itself, thereby mirroring their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, viewer, and screen. Similarly, Kovalcikova’s uncanny figures emerge from a world embedded within our world. Her two paintings Silence and Borders (2023) and Train of Thought (2024) unravel in a psychological dimension that feels at once familiar and rejected, desirable yet unspeakable.

Eating as a bonding and synchronizing—even ritualistic—experience among a group of individuals underpins the dynamic of the family portrait in EXPORT’s film. In turn, in Kovalcikova’s cosmos we become intimate with a carnal consumption of reality by way of painting: her images cannibalize knowledge in order to retain it. The figures in Silence and Borders—which Kovalcikova started to paint in 2009—are inspired by the artist’s intimate friendships at the time, and continue to echo that closeness. Shadows and shading are deployed on the canvas to conjure a space in which the legibility of the characters’ postures and moods is resilient even when mutable. Placed in conversation for the first time in the context of A Lover’s Discourse, Kovalcikova and EXPORT share an interest in confronting and understanding the boundaries of provocation and belonging through the empirical manifestation of their works.

Stanislava Kovalcikova’s presentation is accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by Travis Jeppsen.