LONDON—Slovak artist Stanislava Kovalcikova is redefining figurative painting in a way that feels both deeply personal and historically loaded. Her latest exhibition, ret rie vers, at Emalin’s new space in Shoreditch, transforms three floors of a former watchhouse into a tightly woven world of carpeted surfaces, phantasmal portraits, and sculptural bodies. Using 19th-century Prussian clock faces as her canvas, Kovalčíková questions how time — as both an imperial system and a personal reckoning — shapes memory, identity, and the unconscious.
Trained between Düsseldorf and Vienna, Kovalcikova’s visual language blends the sensuality of Symbolism with the unease of postwar European trauma. Figures emerge and dissolve across her painted surfaces, often unsettling in their ambiguity. In ret rie vers, she draws connections between her own illness and the fragility of the body, between religious timekeeping and authoritarian control, and between the act of painting and the psychological concept of retrieval — as if her brush is dragging lost moments out from under history’s carpet.
What sets Kovalcikova apart is not just her technical range, but her refusal to separate artwork from environment. The installation references everything from the brutal upholstery of the London Underground to the metaphysical architecture of Uccello and Tintoretto. She’s not just showing paintings; she’s building a consciousness you step into — a collapsing tunnel of memory, metaphor, and myth. And in doing so, she’s staking a bold claim: that figuration still has the power to disturb, seduce, and reveal.
Text by Liora Ashwood
29. MARCH. MMXXV. PLUM
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