The young Czech artist understands the unwritten rules well enough to scramble them
An initial spin around Klára Hosnedlová’s Nest suggests someone who learned about contemporary art via limited hearsay, never saw any and plunged into making it anyway, oblivious to its conventions – which, in reality, is to say that this young Czech artist understands the unwritten rules well enough to scramble them. The first things that pop out in her German solo debut, most of whose elements look as much like tricked-out interior design as art, are wall-mounted multipart reliefs. These large, heavy-looking swathes of terrazzo, stylishly punctuated by shallow grooves and speckled with hemispheric glass baubles, form the backdrop for what initially appear to be realist paintings in a washed-out palette. Depicting half-naked bodies draped with fragmentary moulds, or pseudoscientific rituals using smartphones, magnifying glasses and knives, or people holding perturbed cats, these are, it turns out, painstaking embroideries. Nearby, a biomorphic grey blob of a stone table with a recess in it contains bulbous reishi mushrooms, used in Chinese medicine; on the floor beside this assemblage are pools of melted glass, like giant tears. Clustered around a steel pole that runs from floor to ceiling are myriad javelins of smoked glass, black at the top and clear at the base. This thing looks, by turns, brand-new and burned out.
You access the second room through a bespoke, parallelogram-shaped doorway suggesting sci-fi design by a drunken architect and are confronted with an ersatz tilted arc: a freestanding curve of (I think) stone cladding on a frame, tucked inside which is a bench upon which you can sit and look from afar at another small embroidery, which again feels off. There’s a retrofuturist air to proceedings, but it’s muddled, fogged. Hosnedlová’s aesthetics might not look so alien, though, if you’re familiar with the Ještěd Tower, a flashy hyperboloid – like an inverted long-stemmed funnel – that perches on a mountaintop near Liberec in the Czech Republic. Erected in 1973, combining the functions of television tower, weather station and upscale hotel, it still exists, but it’s a marooned fragment of a utopian modernist future that never came to pass. I haven’t been, but some of the photographs online of its interiors are in clear correspondence with Hosnedlová’s aesthetics; certainly, the handout says, the show is based on ‘extensive research’. Her embroideries, meanwhile, are based on photographs of her friends performing gnomic rites in the tower, as if probing the place, trying to make sense of it and connect with it from a position of alienated distance; and in the process setting up a distorted, dragging model of time, counterbalancing the click of the shutter and the slow accretion of thread.
The show’s title, then, is a concise marker of distance from the hopefulness of futuristic thinking – tomorrow as a safe, comfortable place – to today’s soft dystopia, with surveillance devices (like Google’s Nest) in our own homes. The irony of all this is that Hosnedlová is returning, if inadvertently, to more than one historical moment. Her engagement is surely sincere, her ability to affectively encode melancholy historical consciousness undeniable, but go beyond the details of her work and it feels like a flashback to the vanguard art of the early twenty-first century, circa 2004, when – tied to a growing interest in the archival – a large number of artists turned to research- driven rumination on lost modernist utopias and raking the ashes of the century prior. This was a period style for a while, starting when Hosnedlová was in her early teens, and it’s odd – though appropriate for a moment when art seems to have lost the knack for forward development – to see it roll around again so quickly. But then, as her show demonstrates, the past never really goes away. It keeps coming back to needle us, to remind us how much better the present could be.
Klára Hosnedlová, Nest, was on view at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 7 November – 20 February
