Momart Gallery presents “Dreams for Breakfast” solo exhibition by Markéta Šenkyřík curated by Monica Palumbo on display from July 12 to Sept. 15.
In the exhibition spaces of Momart Gallery in Matera on Friday, July 12, “Dreams for Breakfas” the solo exhibition of artist Markéta Šenkyřík, a bookbinder and illustrator originally from the Czech Republic, but who has lived and worked in Bernalda since 2020. She studied book design in Ostrava, and Belli Arti in Clermont-Ferrand in France. Then the arrival in London where she worked for Shepherd’s Bookbinders and co-managed an independent art space, 139Artspace. As an illustrator, her work includes the ‘limited edition of 24 illustrated booklets used as script presentations for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis film project, commissioned by the director. Her latest exhibition, curated by art historian Merisabell Calitri, is “I Dreamed of Being Your Native Landscape,” which was exhibited last May in the rooms of the Bernalda Municipal Art Gallery of Modern Art.
In Matera in the exhibition curated by Momart Gallery artistic director Monica Palumbo, the artist speaks of transformation, identity and intimacy, spirituality declined in a communicative key. It is the feminine that takes over an everyday life in which the body, having lost its commodification, becomes a sinuous line immersed in an indefinite space, an element endowed with a vibrant and powerful energy capable of crossing imaginary boundaries. From Šenkyřík’s drawings there emerges a delicacy declined through the use of soft, rarefied, ethereal colors, just as ethereal are the lines that give concreteness to his thought; images that fade into each other, merging with each other and with what surrounds them. Common and recognizable visual references need to be investigated with the gaze of one who is able to go beyond the form and grasp, through his own inner gaze, its hidden principle. Birth, life, pleasure, pain, happiness and gratitude are the foundations on which the artist’s poetics are built, explicit and direct but, at the same time, endowed with an extreme delicacy such as to arouse, in the viewer, conflicting, strong and sincere emotions. Through Markéta Šenkyřík’s works therefore, form becomes minimal, clean, direct and transformed substance, a sharing of life experiences as a devotional act, a gift that changes into cathartic action and expresses the pure meaning of being a mother, woman, body and soul.
The exhibition will open Friday, July 12, at 6:30 p.m. and will remain open until Sept. 15. Text by Alessia Pietropinto.
