Markéta Nováková: Traces in Porcelain

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Where?

• Galerie N

  • Jehlářská 14, Jablonec n. Nisou

When?

• Opening: 8. 4. 2025, 17:00

• Exhibition duration: 8. 4. – 9. 5. 2025

 

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Curator:

• Dita Hálo, curator of contemporary design, glass, ceramics, and porcelain.

About the Exhibition

The second venue for this year’s project presentation is Galerie N, Technical University of Liberec, a space often showcasing academic experts from universities and colleges with a focus on visual arts, design, and applied arts. The project was created in collaboration with several museum institutions that contributed by lending photographs of collection objects, including the City Museum in Bechyně, the North Bohemian Museum in Liberec, and the Regional Museum in Teplice, for which they are thanked. We also thank the Family Malý Foundation for supporting the project.

The STOPY V PORCELÁNU (Traces in Porcelain) project started in 2024 and is based on the habilitation thesis *The Memory of Porcelain*, which included the lecture *Traces of Porcelain* (documenting the works of artists working with porcelain in Slovakia) by Associate Professor Markéta Nováková, ArtD. The project maps traditional ceramics and porcelain production sites, transforming them into updated decorations on selected shapes from the author’s design work. The aim of the project is to revive interest in motifs linked to local traditions, with potential applications for regional promotion through the innovation of decoration and shape, thereby giving the traditional creative industry in the Czech Republic a new impulse and appealing to domestic ceramic and porcelain enthusiasts with contemporary artistic language. At the same time, the proposed decoration is intended to stand out in a broader European context of product design. In the applied sphere, the final product may be used as a representative regional gift item of high aesthetic and craft production. The involvement in the cycle of the author’s exhibitions and the gradual emergence of reminiscences of more or less known decorations will create a research of these decorations for educational use in the field and their subsequent promotion of regional significance through exhibitions, catalogs, and media promotion.

Part of the project already began in 2024. Markéta Nováková exhibited with a greater time gap since 2018 in the Czech Republic, where she primarily does not work. The exhibition *With Love, Markéta and Simona* in 2018, with her colleague and former student Simona Janišová, took place as part of the pan-European project *Ceramics and its Dimensions*, a partial grant of *Shaping the Future*, in collaboration with the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague and the company Laufen. This year, after six years, the author presented an overview exhibition in a small but highly specialized gallery of the Beroun Ceramic Museum in Beroun at the most attractive season time, during the Beroun Pottery Market in September, receiving significant media attention. The project will conclude this year in southern Bohemia, in České Budějovice, where it will be exhibited at the Town Hall Gallery, established by the City of České Budějovice.

For the application of decorations, the designer chose shapes from her previous works that allow the application of the decoration so that it stands out in the surface. In most cases, she does not transfer them into a rotational shape, as in the original products from historical production. This results in a shift in graphic processing and a move into the current design context. She also deliberately does not return to individual ceramic technologies, even though her professional and technological knowledge does not rule out this possibility. The use of high-quality hard porcelain, underglaze painting, applying ceramic paint through stencils or screen printing moves the final product in both utility and aesthetic qualities into the present without limiting usability.

Markéta Nováková has previously been and continues to be interested in the folk and traditional culture of the Czech Republic, Moravia, and Slovakia. She participated as an author, award-winning contestant in the pan-European competition *Circles on Water* organized by the ÚĽUV in Bratislava, where she is currently a member of the expert evaluation committee.

 

 

 

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