“Magic Everywhere” exhibition at The Naked Room gallery

There is a lot of everyday life that becomes art in the works of the Lviv artist Kinder Album. Her works really resemble drawings from a children’s album, in which completely non-childish subjects are drawn.

However, the exhibition “Magic Everywhere” at The Naked Room gallery is special. Ceramics, wooden objects, graphic works and even tapestries made of combed dog fur are collected here. As stated by the curators, it is a “magical space to reset from daily tragedies.”

But our reality is such that in any familiar or fairy-tale image you can see a danger or a trigger. UP. Culture tells how Kinder Album manages to work with a reality that hurts.

The pseudonym of the artist is Kinder Album – is extremely apt when it comes to the way most of her works are created. For example, in the “Pool” series, where she talks about swimming trips, because that’s how she tries to overcome anxiety.

The exhibition “Magic Everywhere” also opens with four paintings reminiscent of children’s drawings. They were made in March last year. However, childishness does not mean infantilism, and the images constructed by the artist encourage us to think about stereotypical social roles, our reaction to everyday problems, and physicality.

Curators also talk about it Maria Lanko and Lizaveta Herman: “The conflict between provocative images and the “childish language” of their artistic embodiment turns the gaze back to where our intellectual chastity seeks to take it. Unable, we find ourselves “naked and funny”, like bad uncles, in the legendary cartoons-comics”.

Such images include the sun in a cup of coffee, or a chestnut man carrying a bag of groceries.

Next to them we see the picture “Braid”, where a red braid ends up on the back of a chair. This is also a reason to think about our “I”, whether it really wants that. what we want, not others from us. The series ends with the painting “Temptation”, where a woman sits on her back in the devil.

In the conditions of the escalation of Russian shelling, the watercolor painting “Every Night”, where a woman becomes a target in the middle of knives that rest against the wall behind her, is particularly striking. Involuntarily, the lines of the poet Victoria Amelina, who died last year from a Russian rocket in Kramatorsk, are mentioned:

Air alert throughout the country

It’s as if they’re being shot every time

All of them

And they aim at only one

Mostly in the one who is on the edge

Today is not you, rebound.

For the woman in the picture, there really is a “repulsion” – none of the knives touch her body. However, these knives limit its contours – every wound today will shape tomorrow’s reality and leave a cut.

Among the presented works of the Kinder Album are several tapestries. They all make sense of sexuality and the everyday existence of war. Emptiness inside the female body. “A hole has formed in me, through which the landscape of Ukraine can be seen. The landscape is winter, in which I got stuck on February 22, and this winter continues to this day, turning years into minutes”, – explains the artist.

At the same time, we learned to live in everyday life with war. And we perceive phenomena and words-metaphors differently: “But this hole does not remain empty. It is filled with a new history, a new love for the country, as if Ukraine has displaced everything superfluous in the soul and taken its rightful place. And I am comfortable with this hole.”.

A large part of the gallery space is occupied by a platform with ceramic, glass and wooden works of the artist. This is a fabulous microworld in which you want to look at every fragment, understand the principles by which it works, immerse yourself in this world to break away from reality.

There is a “Living Cylinder” – a hat that has a nose, eyes, mouth and ears. Or a bone from which a lily grows. Ceramics “Orange peel” with its shape, texture, and realism also invite careful consideration. Her Kinder Album calls her one of the works she “made for the soul”.

On the same platform, we can see a work-homage to Claude Monet – the “Water Lily” ceramics. If in Monet it is a water landscape with lilies, in the Kinder Album, as usual, a woman is in the center of the image. And we observe water, lilies, and leaves primarily because her body manifested them. But in any fiction, there are also evil characters, such as in the ceramic works “Black Leg”, where the ankle ends up on a chain, “White Blind Coyote” with blood on his teeth, and black “Belt”, which frightens with its rudeness and by weight

All objects converge to one point – the “Red Button”. It seems to undermine the entire constructed reality, because the button can be pressed, and everything that will happen after that is completely unknown.

A ceramic “Corset” in the form of a woman’s breast was placed on one of the walls. It seems as if the body itself becomes your armor, which both protects and is threatened at the same time.

In the end, “Talking Headphone” brings you back to reality. This is a wireless headphone that has been enlarged several times, from which fragments of the United news marathon are heard continuously. The author names her work “your New Year’s horror”and this is also a way to more easily experience the reality of war – to make fun of its inappropriate or incomprehensible episodes.

“Magic is everywhere”, as described by the curators of The Naked Room, really turns out to be a complete statement of the Kinder Album. It speaks of a reality in which the war continues, in which your feelings, consciousness, memories are imprisoned in the war, but in which you have not lost the ability to find something that supports you and brings you back to what is important. And every act of creation, which, despite destruction and loss, took place is also a way to reinvent yourself every day.

The line between magic and reality blurs, and in difficult times we finally find something or someone to share our pain, anxiety, and vulnerability with.