Sabina Knetlová – What Do My Eyes Look Like?

Sabina Knetlová (1996) is a distinctive member of the younger generation of sculptors. This graduate of Ostrava University understands sculpture as an open, variable situation and as embodying a particular feeling or emotion. In her work, she always relates to a specific setting with which she forges a personal relationship. Her at first glance figural style possesses latent references to the landscape and the long-term process of its geological “formation,” to its spatial rhythm and the contours of the horizon. A shape’s solid line reflects the uniqueness of its epicenters (cores), which give rise to axes of growth and vision (there and back). Common epicenters include the head, the arm, or another limb, but they could also be trees, branches, or stones that are in contact with their surroundings. Most of the time, they make a passive impression, like perceptive, focused bodies. They reflect themselves and “figurate” space.

Knetlová’s sculptures seem to register and absorb the diversity and colorfulness of the world around them, transforming it into a reduced “object” or “body” that retains the dreamlike and meditative nature of the particular formal vocabulary. In this regard, her sculptures are characterized by certain easily identifiable stylistic approaches which grow out of the typification of a particular movement that has been frozen, explored, contemplated. Knetlová essentially halts the temporal flow of processes in order to identify situations of a quiet, meditative rapture that dematerialize the surface of the sculpture and align it with processes of concentrated consciousness.

Sabina Knetlová’s sculptures free us of the burdens of the physical world and the expressiveness of too powerful emotions. They carry us off into a state of paradisical timelessness; into contemplation and delicate, playful dreaming; into a world where time flows differently. Immeasurably and indefinably. More slowly. Without the stressful horizon of tomorrow. Sometimes perhaps even introspectively, in reverse. Each of her sculptures offers a view of cyclically repeated internal processes that produce a self-enclosed entity – accumulators of vitality.

Knetlová combines a clearly defined shape with the need for clarity and calmness. Sculpture is a distinctly static medium that gives the artist the chance to choose, separate, or isolate things that, by their material essence, are subsequently folded into the stream of unstable time, which they must face head-on, like a ship on a stormy sea. Sculpture is a human gesture whose essence presumes that human existence transcends the limitations of linear time in favor of the cyclical and the timeless. Hence Knetlová’s inspirational relationship to the sculpture of ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Gothic era. It is also the reason that her sculptures reflect a sense of narrativity, which transforms personal experience into a universally comprehensible formal vocabulary.

Knetlová’s primary sculptural material is concrete, whose characteristics are anything but sentimental. Her works’ somewhat rough shapes and raw surfaces are balanced out and softened by her use of industrially produced hoses, which in the context of her sculptures or sculptural installations represent the material’s nervous and digestive systems, meaning they are a revitalizing organic element. The title of the exhibition – “What Do My Eyes Look Like?” – is a reference to the dynamism present in some of the heads’ eyes, whose shining pebbles seem to return the viewer’s gaze. They communicate. Unexpectedly. Surprisingly. In visual art, the eyes are ultimately the most fundamental point of intersection between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer. The touch of the eyes shapes the color spectrum of the visual experience. In Sabina Knetlová’s hands, concrete is liberated from its status as rough building material and serves to articulate and make present fragile and vulnerable stories that, thanks to their archaic nature, slow down and erase the stress of the overwrought world of today.

/Petr Vaňous/

Gallery of Contemporary Art and Architecture / České Budějovice House of Art

Náměstí Přemysla Otakara II. 38, České Budějovice 370 01, CZ / tel.: 420 386 360 539

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