Texts

 

Ida Schyum 2020

cand.mag in art history 

The corona crisis has radically extended our bodies. As a point of no return, we now conceive ourselves as intertwined in an enormous microbic network constantly exchanging microorganisms. Since a stranger under two meters away from us these days seems like a risk of contagious connection, the embodied sense of a relation to the world’s larger goings-on, will always be prevalent. But while the analog body is in quarantine, we extend ourselves digitally more than ever searching for intimacy through Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Skype. As these meetings for most of us has turned out somehow unfulfilling in the end, it is even more clear that art is crucial to investigate, expand, and critically question our digital platforms and interfaces. 

A hallucinogenic vibe is imminent in Ida Kvetny’s Virtual Reality (VR) work Lithodendrum. Dancing figurines and deep techno grottoes make up for all the closed adventure parks and shopping malls during the quarantine. The viewer is delegated to experience this grotesque multi-sensory inferno with corona edition DIY VR-glasses. Kvetny’s work is the party we need to immerse ourselves into these times. Definitely, you could party in here for days, drifting away into a subconscious cosmography of Medusa-like avatars on saturated coral red cliffs with deep blue trees swaying in the wind. Like Neverland, it only exists if you believe in it, but is it the future? Kvetny’s reckless visual language and color fetichism makes this escapist experience close to an overdose, and thus, the work ends up questioning the very nature of VR: What kind of Disneyland are we immersing ourselves into, when the body’s capability of new sensations has become a crucial resource for contemporary forms of capitalism in digital creative industries? And how does this digital Disneyland impact us? 

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 Kvetnys kosmografi 2020

Af Laura Ifversen

 

Kunsthistorisk set befinder vi os i en spændende periode, hvor kunsten er ved at finde sig selv på ny. Som til alle tider skabes kunstværker ud fra en idé, og det formodes i høj grad, med Marshall McLuhans ord, at ”the medium is the message” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964). Og ja, kunstmediet benyttet i et bestemt værk havde enorm betydning i 1960’erne og 70’ernes brydningstid.

I dag må materialet også tillægges stor betydning for fortolkningen. Med de genreoverskridende, tværmediale og multimodale kunstværker, installationer og performances der kreeres i dag, synes vi dog at befinde os på den anden side af det vendepunkt, der kendetegnedes ved opbrud. Vi befinder os nu i en tid, hvor materialer og medier syntetiseres og kobles for at forhandle betydninger på en ny måde.

Billedkunstneren Ida Kvetny (f. 1980) er en tydelig eksponent for dette skred. Hun arbejder med skulptur, med maleri og med digital formgivning på en måde, hvor hendes stilistiske karakteristika overskrider grænserne mellem et medium og et andet, og lejrer sig ubesværet på tværs af materialer.

Når Kvetny nu arbejder med mediekunst – og VR i særdeleshed – fusionerer hun sit digitale spor med sin eksisterende værkproduktion og skabt en multimodal billedverden, hvor beskueren kan nå et nyt niveau af indlevelse.

Der er ikke noget modsætningsforhold mellem de fysiske genstande og de digitale værker.

For Kvetny bliver det digitale og computerdrevne et nyt værktøj på samme tid som det er det medie, som bedst sammenknytter de associative tråde fra leret og lærredet.

Det opleves tydeligt i kunstprojektet The Kvetny Galaxy, der udfoldes i varierende konstellationer, som et Gesamtkunstwerk under stadig udvikling. I den seneste iteration har kunstneren gentænkt en række rumforløb, der med en blanding af fysiske objekter og installatoriske elementer i et sammenhængende multimodalt og multisensorisk oplevelsesrum.

En hel bygning indrettes som en grottelignende verden, som Kvetny selv refererer til som en kunstnerisk realisering af Platons hulelignelse. De figurer og væsener, der befolker Kvetnys billedverden er præget af en tydelig primitivisme og hun anskuer dem som en slags primale arketyper, der – på samme tid som beskueren – har potentiale for nye erkendelser og mulighed for forandring.

Hvert enkeltværk eller objekt indgår i et intrikat netværk af og kobling mellem maleri, skulptur, naturmaterialer, digitale billeder og lyd. Til sammen tegner de et helt univers. 

I mediekunstens historie kan The Kvetny Galaxy bedst sammenlignes med en storskala-udvidelse af 1990’ernes VR CAVE design (CAVE – Computer Automated Virtual Environment), hvor værket er realiseret i hele det rum, der omgiver beskueren. Her væver digitale projektioner, fundne genstande og håndlavede objekter sig ind i hinanden og ind i den fantastiske fortælling, der omslutter beskueren i en blød stemmes favntag.

Stemmen kommer alle og ingen steder fra og ligesom en alvidende fortæller befinder den sig uden for tid og sted. Ligesom Demiurgen i Platons Timaios, skaber stemmen orden ud af kaos. Eller snarere, den giver en slags struktur eller rytme til værkets visuelle elementer.

Den oplæste tekst er skrevet af Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen og følger ikke et lineært narrativ.

Det ene øjeblik tager teksten os op på et observerende niveau for det næste at kaste os ind i sindet på ’The Kvetny Organism’ som er en place-holder både for, hvad man måske kunne kalde værkprotagonisten, for beskueren og for kunstneren selv: Hvem end, der netop er trådt ind i Kvetnys næsten psykedeliske ursuppe, og som er ved at undersøge sine omgivelser og som er på nippet af at erkende sig selv som tænkende og handlende væsen. Ubevidst internaliserer vi protagonistens position.

 

The Kvetny Galaxy søger ikke rationel orden. I stedet er vi med midt i en eksploratorisk skabelsesproces, som løber parallel med en associationsbåren fortolkningsproces, der tager afsæt i fælleskulturelle Ur-troper – eller i hvert fald en særlig billedbåren arv.

“The digital breath of the Kvetny organism had resuscitated every single old drawing in the world and now the drawings recirculated, crowding like small punks, thrown from parallel world to parallel world. They were cracked in precisely the right way. Corny and shimmering of old symbolic and new meanings.” (Bertelsen, Ida Marie Hede: Ida Kvetny GAZE, 2019)

Værket antager form som en virtuel rejse sammenlignelig med en opdagelsesekspedition i en kollektiv underbevidsthed.Referencerne er legio og som sådan synes værket at udfolde sig som en serie fænomenologiske propositioner, hvor beskueren er fri til at drage sine egne slutninger. Værket byder sig til som et eksperiment; som en kunstnerisk petriskål. Ord, lyd og billeder skaber et åbent værk, hvor beskuerens sansning og fantasi aktiveres på en særlig selvbevidst facon og hvor betydning og fortolkning forhandles og forvandles med hver ny tilføjelse.

Medium og materiale står tydeligt frem hos Kvetny, men det er i konstellationen – i værkernes åbne dialog med hinanden og det perciperende subjekt – at Kvetnys særegne univers for alvor udfolder sig som genreoverskridende kosmografi.

 

 

The Kvetny Galaxy 2019

This is the story of an inner, psychedelic journey into Ida Kvetny’s universe

By

Curator, Mette Woller

She was lying on the mattress with her eyes closed. Her body sank down deeper.

Suddenly, the back of her head exploded: Like two palms from behind, psychedelic colours flowed in front of her head – en route to embrace the face. At first, she only sensed their presence from the corner of her eye, but after a while she was enclosed. 

Strong pink, orange and blue colours in drop-shaped patterns swam side by side with lazy eyes that one could float into. Fragile birds lay mislaid in cocoons. Little faces could be seen everywhere. Everything happened so fast. Hybrids of animals and humans fluttered in front of her eyes. Her body became liquid and melted into the space around her. It was a time and spatiality she had never experienced before. Shapes she didn’t know existed. Unidentified organisms that were in- and outside of her body.

All of a sudden, everything detonated into crystals and she found herself floating in a stellar universe. The earth was gone, but she was not afraid. A calm voice called through the thousands of shooting stars that splintered around her. 

Without making a sound, the voice asked if she was ready. A black figure with a diamond-shaped face starred without eyes in the distance. It came closer and insisted on showing her that which she had repressed and did not want to see: To peel off layers of her pain to find the subconscious. Their dialogue passed in silence. Together, they flew towards The Kvetny Galaxy.  She inside it. Engulfed by darkness.

Blazing fires slowly lit up the darkness. It was a sharp and bluish light that turned into blue smokescreens that became tears on her cheeks. They petrified and turned into fossils from the past that she could bring along. She softly opened her eyes and found herself back in the room, but in a parallel world that contained an extra dimension. She had landed in The Kvetny Galaxy. The 3-dimensionality of reality was flat compared to this world. Transparent walls of smoke with traces of psychedelic colours cut through the space. The entire room breathed as one big organism: Like a giant duvet breathing in and out.

A blue, deformed face with a red mouth came floating over her belly. It had long string-like, mechanical arms that slowly began to repair her and put her turmoil in place. At the same time, a green figure with blue hair circled around them on a flying carpet. The third eye at the back of the carpet was shinning bright. Her belly floated to the side and down into the mattress. The blue face told her that she would encounter objects on her way that would give her a new insight. And then it was gone again.

The walls of the room lay down and opened up to the outside. A painting was still hanging. She floated into it. The body followed every line and moved behind them. There were sculptures whose flesh she could dissect by moving through them. The painting opened up into an urban space. A large, black face with colourful veins and a gentle, yellow mouth kept guard over the city like a shining moon. She flowed passed it and over the roofs of the houses. Islands with ceramic figures floated between the rooftops. Ceramic avatars looked curiously as she passed them. They became a part of her inner self. There was a promiscuity of shapes and colours that only existed here: A love and a darkness that called attention to new world orders. She slowly returned to the mattress. Gently rose and went outside. The houses were no longer laden with negative energy. She could now see the beauty of the world she existed in. 

The world was as new.

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Ida Kvetny GAZE 2019

By

Art historian and author Ida Marie Hede

 

The Kvetny dark of night encloses the city. City lights flare. A fluttering activity begins in the small civilization. No one knows the origin of each object, but the place is filled with things. What things? How did they get here? The treetops murmur and whine glitteringly in silver, they want to answer, the trees begin to stutter a slow tale of creation:

In the dawn of time – no, at once – the Kvetny Organism came into life – she grew out of nothing, or maybe out of a wormhole or a thought . Now she was bald, now she coquettishly flicked her hair.  Then she resembled a woman, and then an atmosphere.

A soft, upholstered sleeping mask appeared and covered the Kvetny organism’s half closed eyes. Her hands suddenly moved on their own and grabbed the small controllers. Thus, an aura of wild authority manifested itself in and around the Kvetny organism. She enjoyed pulling the controllers and listening to the low pulse of the machine.

In the calm Kvetny dark of night a circle rotated 360 degrees. It moved in small, angry and tickling thrusts to one, then to the other side across bridges and through passages. She pulled on the controllers, the circle withdrew its eyes. Pixels appeared like buds shooting into the night. No pixels occurred randomly, even though they appeared in a crowd. Each octagonal image comprised a sad heart.

The Kvetny organism woke, threw her hair to one side, then to the other. With the wind in her face she stretched her sculptural body in a flood of mother-of-pearl, twisted her head back and let herself multiply in new bodies. She was fond of  many detachable hands and many detachable masks. It was the dark of night’s walk-in closet. Filled with limbs that could float freely. You could put a large finger through the lever in her back. From her glazed, metallic skin, from her DNA and from her eyes and from her rays into the world, she begot everything hallucinatory and all the glittering snakes that were found in humans’ hair and around their arms. The Kvetny organism begot many things. She was athletic and bizarre. She trained like a fury with her chic little kettlebell that had her own image chiseled into it. She allowed it to float through the digital wormholes of the night.

The Kvetny organism whispered-summoned all the things with which she wanted to populate the world: Billboards with 80s kissing mouths. Fighter amazones with aluminum lustre. The mime floated through a Möbius band. She invited everyone who wanted to change their eyes to look through the machine of the upholstered glasses. All the eyes of the city appeared. They looked through the dark of night at the flirting, outdated pictures. The pictures turned to the side and became things of several dimensions. The digital breath of the Kvetny organism had resuscitated every single old drawing in the world and now the drawings recirculated, crowding like small punks, thrown from parallel world to parallel world. They were cracked in precisely the right way. Corny and shimmering of old symbolic and new meanings.

It was a great sorrow to the Kvetny organism that surfaces always froze and that pieces of cloth stopped flowing freely in the warm night winds. The brusque monuments barked at her, they were wild and stupid dogs. She left solidified old fathers on their piedestals. She was all in silver. As the organism that she was, she floated everywhere like oxygen and gave high fives to the other floaters.

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A Danish Painter Channels Freud’s Excavations of the Mind in “Surreal Universe” 2016

by

 Bridget Gleeson  Artsy.com

 

At Gallery Elena Shchukina in London, “Surreal Universe” marks the UK debut of Danish painter Ida Kvetny, and what an introduction it is. Her dense, haunting paintings feel right out of a dystopian fairy tale or horror movie.

These psychedelic works are warped and fantastical, dripping with saturated colors. There’s a dark, Dalí-esque feel to Heat Wave (2015), a composition thick with amoebic monsters and horned creatures, their innards exposed, the landscape strange and threatening. Meanwhile, the floating forms and deep blues of Pompeii (2015) call to mind Chagall.

It may come as little surprise that Kvetny was also inspired by the teachings of Freud, self-described “archaeologist of the mind.” Like an archaeologist conducting a careful excavation, Freud worked to uncover buried thoughts and feelings, to place them in context, to try to understand the relationships between them.

Kvetny’s works look something like an archaeologist’s lab turned upside down, with strange, unidentifiable organisms and artifacts left and right. In fact, Kvetny takes the archaeology metaphor one step further. Displayed alongside her paintings are tiny figurines she calls “fossils”—sculptural relics of the strange universe she’s created.

Using what she calls an “ancient language that transcends time, place, and culture,” her nightmarish landscapes provoke thought and wonder and dread. Philosophical and artistic influences aside, this dark world is all her own.

 Artsy.com

 

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PLANET KVETNY

by

Alberte Winding 2014

 

If we were inhabitants on planet Kvetny, we would each day pass by the little gloomy towers before urban chaos and the body’s erotic hunger would swallow us up in a Bruegel-esque inferno. Ida Kvetny’s aquarium-blue landscapes are generous, overwhelming, sexy, childish and adventurous. They simultaneously quench a thirst with their cool tone, scare us half to death and cuddle us, because there is always a solution, a small way out from the otherwise dramatic conditions; either very tangibly in the form of a super heroine or an amazon or simply a face with mild eyes. The enemy takes the shape of humans in white coats, ever so smug, in a future scenario, devoid of warmthand beauty. Just as with Bruegel the beauty appears in what is dangerous, yet is everywhere in Ida Kvetny’s art. Here our wish for the adventure, the eagerness to dare, to fight against, to surrender, is met constantly. It would be possible to live inside Ida’s installations for days on end, the painted as well as the physical. – And to emerge on the other side, pieced together by a new awareness. Our longing is dangerous, great and wonderful. 

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 A TSUNAMI OF IMAGES

by

Lisbeth Bonde 2014

 

Politics is the art of the possible. Art is the politics of the impossible. 

You have to have someone to deal with the impossible. Otherwise it decays and becomes possible.

Per Højholt in the periodical MAK # 3, 1969 

Ida Kvetny (b. 1980) is a visual artist, who creates on the basis of exuberant energy and with undeniable, highly original talent. She expresses herself in both two and  three dimensions, but sometimes she also brings her subjects to life with the assistance of animations and musical accompanyiment. This allows us to experience the paintings from the inside – as constructed 3D universes. Her pictures are complex and multifocal and are nourished by a stream of internal impulses, dreams and visions, which come to her unannounced from her subconscious. Her work takes shape like one long food chain of ideas, ceaselessly budding and leading her to new places. It is as if she senses the picture’s own internal logic and will, and gives visual form to these subconscious images, which are mixed with crystal clear sensations in a unique, sampled pictorial universe. Just like a tsunami of images, it transmits a cascade of symbols and figures and meanings to us. Although the pictures are full of intense energy, the compositions miraculously manage to retain balance without capsizing. Like abstract, American, All-Over painting, which, as we know, say, from Jackson Pollock, could in principle continue far beyond the picture frame and spread into space, Kvetny’s subjects are infinite. In fact, people prefer to regard them as interior decoration: for example, in the legendary exhibition, On the Wall at Charlottenborg in 2009, in which artists painted temporary murals directly on the walls, and in which Ida Kvetny shone with her high-energy, and extremely expressive painting in powerful colors. Ida Kvetny works in the wake of the stream of consciousness tradition, dating back to the first three decades of the 20th cen turn, and of the 1960s’ automatic writing and art, in which all pallidpremeditations and conscious, editing interventions were overridden in favor of a moreintuitive approach to the subject. Artists shut out their inner arbiter of taste, letting internal, emotional “truth” control the battle on the surface. She puts a canvas on the wall and starts to paint with no prior planning. When the picture lets her know that it is finished, she fixes it to a stretcher. The subject provides this format. From a distance, the paintings come across as abstract, but when you zoom in, they open up a range of narratives, which you, the observer, are free to interpret. Ida Kvetny does not want to influence us in a particular direction, but leaves it to the audience to make sense of her visual messages. One notices that Ida Kvetny’s iconography is reminiscent of a porto-human language,which transcends times, places and cultures, and which, in pictorial terms, crosses swords with various traditions and practices: Mexican folk art, comic strips (Robert Crumb is one of her role models), graffiti and street art and Indians tribal art  – not to mention the patterns and ornamentations, which we know from oriental arts and crafts, and Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. It is truly art created of our globalised age with its patchwork of different sources of inspiration, which Kvetny, like a sort of DJ sampler, invests with a fragmented appearance. At the same time, though, this entirely personal, collage-like universe has a great sense of unity. The multitudinous throng on the surface corresponds very convincingly to life in all its diversity and abundant chaos. In her recent works, she has experimented a lot with colours, ranging from the clearest and strongest primary colours to a more black-and-white universe with cool metallic colours in copper, gold and silver. She also works with a great variety of surface texture and detail. This also applies to her striking works on paper. Our eyes work hard, when we look at Ida Kvetny’s paintings and graphic works. They lead us into, and around an infinite number of simultaneous incidents and situations and micro-universes. Ida Kvetny works at the interface of what painting candy in her distinctive iconography, where she tells us about the good and bad aspects of human life and about nature,which suffers under the selfish, short sighted ravages of human beings. There is a camp atmosphere, tree trunks, which are down for the count in rivers, cafés populated by young fathers, women who yearn, bodies, which are amputated, things both pleasant and less pleasant, and marvelous dreamlike, irrational events which open up a world beyond what is familiar. The plaster sculptures, which for the exhibition, Large Flesh Coloured Containers in Galleri Christoffer Egelund she has organised as a sculpture cabinet, consist of figures in varying degrees of stylisation, who seem to have landed on their metal platform like aliens from outer space. At the same time, they appear somewhat familiar, because they look like some of the characters that we see in her paintings. They are modeled in clay, and then coated with latex, so that she can cast them in multiple series. But they emerge with different traits, since latex gives so much. She then rubs them in graphite powder, which makes them resemble fossils dug up by archaeologists. They are also unique and profoundly original. After two years of study at the Funen Art Academy, Ida Kvetny moved to Edinburgh and in 2006 graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in drawing and painting from Edinburgh College of Art. She completed her studies in 2007 with an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. This equipped her with another, more international platform and a large network, at the same time she learned tradition from scratch, because in England basic craftsmanship is still a fundamental and mandatory part of artistic education. So Ida Kvetny is a complete master, when it comes to the naturalistic/realistic portrayal of the world around us. This means she can consolidate her ideas and visions precisely in the way she considers most appropriate without any limitations in her idiom.

 Lisbeth Bonde is an art critic, based in Copenhagen. She has written several books on contemporary art and is a regular critic on www.kunsten.nu. She also writes features on art for the lifestyle magazine, Bo Bedre.

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