Stanislava Kovalcikova | Source @ Paris Internationale 2025♡PI 10, Paris

2025.10.21-2025.10.26

Antenna Space (Shanghai) and Emalin (London) are pleased to present “Source,” a special off-site solo exhibition by Stanislava Kováčiková. As a key project within the Paris Internationale ♡PI 10 section, it celebrates the fair’s first decade. The exhibition features the artist’s new series of paintings presented as installations.

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Emergency Exit

Text by Boris Bergmann

You step into the emergency exit.

Underfoot, the ground gives way. Your feet sink into a strange substance. Instinctively, you think of paint — at its most raw and clotted, its most elemental form. But your body deceives you, as it always does. It’s something else. Plastiline, spread all around you, chaotically, by Stanislava Kovalčíková. The websites that sell it don’t lie. They promise: a highly precise, non-toxic material.

A kind of modeling clay, Plastiline is used by children and by patients in art therapy. It has nothing professional about it, nothing of the materials proper to artists. Its thickness is both repulsive and consoling — a tender, noxious crust.

In the emergency exit, Plastiline covers every wall, and the floor as well. Colors drip and merge into a sinister tie-dye, irregularly stirred by the artist’s hand. To the right, Caput Mortuum — a deadly red. To the left, green. At the back, ochre. On the ground, violet strewn with sunflower seeds. You walk across this unstable terrain, this uneven surface. Your passage leaves marks and stains, evidence and traces. The entire space is intended to be contaminated, to be imprinted and mixed together.
You enter as if into a cave that swallows you whole, a voracious, pitiless burrow. An excrescence, a utopia, a defilement — a dead appendage.

At the heart of the emergency exit, you stand close — almost too close — to Kovalčíková’s works. There is no distance between you and the material. You could almost touch it. Oil paint, pastel and found objects ripped from the trash of everyday life.

The Weighted Apparition began eleven years ago. The traces of that long duration remain. On the canvas, visions — children, an angel, perhaps a doll and adults — inspired by the solemnity of a political gathering in Berlin. In Helmet, an ordinary, banal image — the head of a scooter driver — is adorned with a fragment of Kovalčíková’s own tooth. You can feel the constant layering of brushstrokes, the ghosts of older paintings that persist beneath.

The Death and the Maiden, a fantastic allegory drawn from Germanic iconography, appears in altered form: the Maiden climbs onto Death’s shoulders like a well-behaved child. Night Shift returns to a common vision, blending pastel and velvet. Nautilius is crossed with gold leaf — here, even this noble substance turns to filth and stain. Kovalčíková delights in corrupting everything. On the canvas, a shell covers a sexual organ. And in Fortuna, another antique vision subverted by the painter, a body walks upon the faces of its adversaries — as if to remind us that good fortune only comes by crushing others.

At the far end of the emergency exit, you come face to face with your own reflection. You look at yourself in the murky mirror, in its sullied opacity. You cannot leave. This is an exit without rescue. Without escape. You must turn back. Pass once more before Kovalčíková’s visions. Walk again upon the Plastiline. Retrace the marks, the evidence you left behind.

In the emergency exit — more than an installation, a simulacrum — Stanislava Kovalčíková grants painting its most absolute, most primal place. In the emergency exit, painting belongs to nothing but the violence and desire of the one who paints. To nothing but the greatest freedom.

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Image and text courtesy of the artist, Emalin and Antenna Space.

Photo: Mark Blower

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Paris Internationale 2025 ♡PI 10

Stanislava Kovalcikova: Source, Antenna Space and Emalin offsite

Level 0, 22 Av., Paris, FR