Klara Kristalova
Particular to Kristalova’s imperfect figuration is the ambiguity it lends her characters. That her dark pigments more often run in the glaze gives many the appearance of having just stepped from a bog, hair still wet and heavy with water. Such is Black and White Sisters, whose two figures appear both sweet and sinister, charming and vaguely ghoulish. The sisters smile innocently, incline their heads towards one another in quiet companionship. But, what with their expressions running down their faces as black stains against white skin, they hardly make for a picture-perfect pair. Rather, they appear as the ghosts of girls drowned, doomed to be forever damp under the lustre of their glaze.
b.1967, Prague
Klara Kristalova works quickly in clay, moulding her many figures with hurried imprecision. To take too much time, to pay too close attention to each form, would undo the roughness of her work. “It has to be done my way,” the artist says, “to be the right ugly.” Strange and enigmatic, Kristalova’s stoneware figures are at once fanciful and psychological, playful and disturbing. They appear as characters from unfamiliar fairy tales, some human, other animal, a few neither one nor the other but somewhere in-between. All share a sense of foreboding. No fairy tale is without foe, without malevolent shadow. So too, the artist suggests, our memories of childhood, however happy, are more often stalked by darkness. The naivety of Kristalova’s ceramic sculptures, with their crude forms and running glaze, lends them an endearing vulnerability. Her characters are seldom malign but rather imperfect protagonists, the figures of a fever dream. There are no heroes here, no happy endings – only strange magic and uncertain plotlines.