Denisa Lehocká usually calls her works Untitled, refraining from singling out individual pieces from her continuous flow of production. Each one is a manifestation of an elaborate, intuitive process of creation. Once they leave her studio to become part of an exhibition, these artworks can turn into elements of temporary compositions, form clusters, or else remain solitary entities, punctuation marks of a sort within the larger formation of the given show.
For her recent exhibition “POINT,” Lehocká created a nuanced choreography of sculptures, drawings, and installations that deepened her ongoing reflections on the production of objects, material memories, and the endless permutation of form. Small, organically shaped sculptures, many of them made of white or light-beige fabric, some of which showed signs of previous use, protruded delicately from the wall in a straight line. These textile parcels are tightly wrapped with yarn. Hundreds of tiny white beads cover some of them, adding texture to the amorphous structures. Others are encased in plaster, with pearls scattered across their surfaces. Fascinating in their detail, these meticulously crafted pieces are a testament to the time invested in their making. In fact, they seem to encapsulate time itself.
Throughout the gallery’s sequence of rooms, “POINT” featured single pieces and large formations of works, unfolding fragments of a highly subjective poetic language based on shapes and materials. In the first room, a small piece dated 2023—false eyelashes sitting on top of a plaster object that looked like an enlarged aspirin—was juxtaposed with one from 2022, a medium-size abstract painting in light pink. Its most notable attribute, a small black circle, turned out to be a perforation in the canvas.
These elements––the disk shape with the groove, the perforation––recurred in the following ensembles of works like repeated syllables that structure a stanza of verse: Drawings of biomorphic landscapes with threads stitched into the paper have circular perforations; one canvas with circular cuts has a man’s white shirt attached; textile works incorporate beads and embroidery; a large three-dimensional installation responded to the exhibition space, using the artist’s archive of objects made since 2014. In the latter, many individual works were arranged in a grid on the floor, with large pill sculptures balanced upright on their round edges, while smaller ones lay flat, harmonizing with the countless coins, round mirrors, and oval plaster forms scattered around. Silverware was partly encased in plaster; compasses and biomorphic plaster shapes were wrapped in yarn. Potatoes, whose texture naturally changes over time, of course, accentuated the tone-on-tone composition.
To contemplate this large subjective display of the artist’s oeuvre was strangely soothing. Lehocká’s pale universe seems to suspend the here and now. Both poetic and Conceptual, it merges an associative Surrealist object language with an artistic practice that refuses to divide its production into finalized works or distinct projects. It generously invites us to enter the intimate twilight zone of the real and the imagined, to translate time spent working into time spent being. The openness of these works and their ephemeral interactions are the source of their strength.
