KLARA KRISTALOVA: BEAST
Perrotin Paris presents Beast by the artist Klara Kristalova. The artist will showcase a new series of sculptures and works on paper in which reality blends with fiction and boundaries between nature and humanity become blurred, revealing the fragility of life and the complexity of the relationships between beings.
April 13 - June 1, 2024
“I am a sculpting draughtsman and painter”: Klara Kristalova, born in 1967, doesn’t let herself be pigeonholed into categories, and even takes pleasure in defying them. Far from any conventional approach, she allows unexpectedness and singularity to emerge from the abolition of boundaries between the arts, from the exploration of undefined margins. In the mid-1990s, her artistic path took her away from pure painting and towards modelling.
Beast invites us to plunge into Kristalova’s enigmatic universe. Reality blends with fiction: human or animal heads and masks rub shoulders with hybrid beings, with unusual distortions of scale. What emerges is a fantastic world where anxiety borders on humour, as with the gigantic insect in The fly’s kiss, whose flower-like proboscis delicately touches the child’s lips. An unexpected moment of tenderness is born from this supernatural kiss.
The indeterminate nature of these hybrid beings places them in a fantastical universe rooted in symbolism: in front of All my thoughts or the flower-faces, we are irresistibly reminded of Odilon Redon’s Smiling Spider. These beings become “phantasms,” in the etymological sense of apparitions. Are we in another reality or are we in the world of dreams, or even nightmares, a distant cousin of the visions of Munch or Goya?
Kristalova’s hybrid beings sound out the way we look at others, our society’s complex relationship with monstrosity and deviations from the norm. What room is there for difference when smooth, standardised beauty is valued above all else? The hybrid world challenges the definition of the human, and raises the question of the definition of the body, its limits and its integrity.
The liminality of physical appearance is also the liminality of an instant: the narrative seems interrupted, without a thread to hold on to. The viewer questions both the nature of the beings and the links between them: why does All my thoughts stand apart? Larger than life, a smiling young girl perched on never-ending stick-legs, seems to move slowly and benevolently amongst the others, like a carnival monster on stilts.
Concerned about the rise of extremes and mankind’s destructive attitude, Kristalova constructs a world that reveals the fragility of life and the complexity of the relationships that are forged between beings. The viewer is invited to question his or her perception, which changes according to his or her psychology and state of mind.