Natalia ŠIMONOVÁ, Slovakia
Structures, 2024
Oil on canvas, 120x100cm
‘For a long time, my artistic practice has focused on exploring socialist-era street furniture in Slovakia. Children’s playgrounds, which I subject to the question of destruction, are the mainstay of my inspiration.
I work mainly with rust, but also with rubbing, collage, peeling and oil. At the same time, I use pastels and paint, which in my earlier work were rather minor.
In my most recent paintings, the expressive drawing revealed is beginning to play an increasingly dominant role. Basic geometric shapes or lines are used as signs. I often vary and multiply these elements within the composition. By transposing the same motif, sometimes on several planes or from different angles, I achieve the effect of endless movement.
This urban furniture is a feature of the landscapes of the so-called Eastern Bloc countries, but it extends its universality beyond our borders. At once specific and universal to the European environment, each country has its own particular manifestation of this type of furniture, created in the same period and still in use today.
They are relics that hold up a mirror to society, and at the same time vestiges of a past regime that continue to function in the present.”
