Lucia Dovičáková (* 1981)
It is Scientifically Proven that We Select a Suitable Donor of Genetic Information According to Certain Criteria, 2003
oil on canvas, 160 x 100 cm
Stronger than Yesterday, 2005
video, PAL, sound, color, 1´26´´
from the collection of from the collection of the Museum of Art in Žilina
acquired by purchase from the artist in 2017
The artist introduced a significant code of self-reference into contemporary painting, it was an important part of her work, with which she entered the art scene just after the middle of the zero years and is still present today. Even now (fifteen years after finishing her studies), the dominant actor of her paintings is a woman in a wide range of typologies, we can really use the term “heroine” (and intentionally in quotation marks), as it covers her various forms: girl, wife, mother, pensioner, but also a mythological creature, a vampire or a Victorian model, and lately also a type that is (seemingly) submissive. However, we are still surprised by the artist’s talent to select a certain reality and point it out without embellishments. Some time ago, I wrote about Lucia Dovičáková’s paintings that they were subversive – and they never stopped being so. However, not so much the topics she has addressed and is addressing (we would normally describe them as intimate and partly still taboo or even perceived as irrelevant – as they are, for example, physicality altered by motherhood, the lunar cycle, fear and helplessness in caring for a newborn, breastfeeding peripetia, sexual fantasies, reluctance to clean the household, etc.) are the subversive element. It is her straightforwardness in which she approaches them, thus changing the perspective we look at (our own) female microworlds. And it is the changes in perspective that are the points mentioned.
Aquiring a pair of paintings and a video could seem like a risky step, as it is a juvenile – both works were created by the artist during her studies. However, both are – a protophase, a precursor of her self-reference. The video Stronger than Yesterday (in the year of its creation the artist completed an internship inatthe Studio of Spatial Communications with A. Čierny at VŠVU – several videos come from that time – perhaps less known, but at least from the point of view of the media important pendants of her paintings) is based on visualization and the soundtrack of James Cameron’s film Terminator. It is an expressively tuned and metaphorically grasped reaction of a woman who solves the hopelessness of her relationship with a man by radically giving up part of herself. A similar element of “scanning” reality through the eye of the cyborg – as an ironic-critical evaluation of the character traits and physical qualities of former partners and at the same time self-reflection of their “choices”, the artist used in the painting – It is Scientifically Proven that We Choose a Suitable Donor of Genetic Information According to Certain Criteria. Both works create a thematic diptych, the leitmotif of which (apart from the element of the artist’s nascent radical self-reference of that time) is also a form of appropriation of the visual motif from the action film.
The acquisition of this work was supported from public sources by the Slovak Arts Council.
The purchase of this work was financed with the contribution of the Žilina self-governing region.
