EXHIBITION
(Not) just a pretty face |
Paulína Halasová & Martina Rötlingová
(Not) just a pretty face
Author: Paulína Halasová & Martina Rötlingová
Curator: Jana Babušiaková
Exhibition opening: 4. 12. 2021
Duration of the exhibition: 4. 12. 2021 – 30.1. 2022
„A selection of recent paintings by Paulína Halasová and Martina Rötlingová critically presents images of female worlds, both reflected and shaped by new and established visual schemes. In the medium of painting, Rötlingová and Halásová disrupt the taken-for-granted female roles and patterns of attractiveness found in media, social networks but also the history of change and artistic practice itself. Both naturally engage with the polemics of the art field; both from the position of the woman-object, which Rötlingová explores in the form of references to canonized paintings of women in art history, and the woman-maker and her position, which Halás pursues. ” – Jana Babušiaková, exhibition curator
Martina Rötlingová (*1987)
is a graduate of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica in the studio of contemporary painting and since her studies has been working continuously in the media of graphics, painting and object. In her work she critically evaluates the phenomena of the contemporary virtual post-media world, confronting it with the “static” mass media of the traditional type of the previous decades. She combines realistic representation through the techniques of hyperrealism and trompe l’oeil with its deconstruction in the form of wrinkling or deformation. In her recent series, Rötlingová works with images and analyses of beauty in the context of the dominant patterns of media images. She continues the begun theme of referring to well-known paintings of women from art history, which she places in relation to modern images of attractiveness.
In 2013, she was a finalist in the Painting of the Year competition. She has exhibited in Slovakia and abroad (Czech Republic, Colombia, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, etc.). She lives and works in Bratislava.
Paulína Halasová (*1992)
A graduate of the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Fine Arts, she is a distinctive manifestation of the artistic generation entering the scene in the second decade of the 21st century. She is an artist who very naturally perceives the situations that social networks bring into the self-image of individuals and relationships, grows up in them and intuitively implements them into her work. She alternates realistic painting techniques with drawing and simple illustration, into which she also enters in the form of text. He relativizes established aesthetic categories such as kitsch, good or bad painting and comments in an ironic way on contemporary images of beauty, power, self-presentation and the desire for attention. In 2019 and 2020 she was a finalist in the VUB Painting of the Year competition. She has presented her work in several joint exhibitions of young artists as well as in several solo exhibition projects.
