Tereza Darášová in Nitra Gallery
We warmly invite you to Tereza Darášová's exhibition, curated by Andrea Pleidel, at Nitra Gallery.
Where:
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Nitra Gallery
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Župné námestie 3
949 01 Nitra
Slovenská republika
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When:
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Opening: 12.9.2024 at 5:30 p.m. CET
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Duration:
- 13. 9. – 10. 11. 2024
- more
Curator
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Andrea Pleidel
Annotation
Drifting into the curve… or maybe the father wanted a son
Embroidery – nothing new, nothing unconventional, you might think, but Slovak visual art of recent decades has incorporated numerous examples of unusual and innovative concepts of embroidery. We can mention creators like Kundy Crew, Vlasta Žáková, Ivana Šáteková, Ivana Sláviková, Beáta Gerbócová or Maroš Rovňák. Each artist was driven to embroidery by different circumstances and their embroidery languages are also diverse. Tereza Darášová is still a student, but she has already developed her own style and still has time and opportunities
to adjust.
Our interest in folklore and traditions comes natural to us. Tereza herself has a privacy screen inherited from her great-great-grandmother which her grandmother has preserved saying They embroidered. Due to a series of funny circumstances, she started working on her first embroidery in 2020, using just her hands, even though she started using a machine around the same time. She focused mostly on wall mounts (i.e. mounted on the wall), appropriated smaller and larger tablecloths and she started to change them in her own image. She enriches them with her own proverbs (witty short sayings), altered traditional ones or completely new ones. She has been embroidering them ever since, as well as short messages sent between friends, but also longer texts from folk tales, trying to emphasise their absurdity. But also their humour and perhaps even childish naivety, but also youthful courage along with the irony of these days.
The exhibition showcases the extent of Tereza’s work, which includes small wall mounts, larger images, several metres long embroidered textiles tempting us to touch them and also upholstered car seats of Citröen 2CV, nicknamed the ugly duck. The automobile has been making appearances in her embroideries since the beginning, just like the oil stain. She embroiders the car into small cloths, sometimes alongside humorous and ironic texts, she also embroiders promotional posters of car makers as well as the upholstery of actual cars. She plans to embroider the seats in her own car which she inherited from her grandfather, a wall painter, making it clear the apple has not fallen far from the tree.
Tereza was led to machine embroidery indirectly as a result of a hand fracture which has caused permanent damage. She got her first machine from her mom, but today she uses a mostly automated one for embroidering and quilting. Tereza is a painter behind a computer, with the needle and thread in the machine making the process faster, but the on-point and distinctive texts are her own and together with the (un)conventional base materials, they create unique pieces. Despite the machine’s automation, Tereza is in control of every stitch, just like women used to be with their needles. Embroidery used to be an inseparable part of life and education of young women, then it turned into a hobby and today, Tereza Darášová and her interests in automobiles give it a new meaning. The worlds of women and men overlap not just in art, let’s just consider how many women work on assembly lines of the Slovak automotive industry.
Tereza’s work has been gradually connecting the delicate feminine decorative embroidery of the traditional Slovak folk craft with the fast, modern, global and male-dominated automotive industry. She blurs boundaries between traditional and modern designs, male and female worlds and tries to connect them. Only time will tell which path will her embroidery notions decide to take…
Tereza Darášová (*2002)
has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava since 2021. She spent the winter term of 2023/2024 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague at the Painting 3 studio led by Josef Bolf. She is currently attending the Studio of Painting led by Klaudia Kosziba. She has been participating at group exhibitions since 2022 and had her first solo exhibition in 2023 in Bratislava. She lives in Stupava.
