Part I / Feb 6 – Mar 22, 2025
Part II / Sep 26 – Oct 11, 2025

Viktorie Langer / Praxis

Just as potatoes are gleaned row by row, I, with my few sentences, glean alongside the paintings and practice of Viktorie Langer. I have found that once writing begins, various analogies start to multiply. Similar or apt comparisons seemingly appear at every turn. It is said that our language is full of dead metaphors. The leg of a table, a line of text—these were originally figurative extensions of meaning. Likewise, in visual art, curves or sharp shapes, color transitions, or structural elements were originally something else, usually something concrete.

Painting, then, is primarily a fossilized spectacle of neuroplastic processes and the calculated reality of the brain. It is said that representative art of all kinds (and probably also non-representative art) relies on the understanding that something can stand in for something else and that it can aid thought or communication. Analogies and metaphors form the foundation of the human ability to create symbols. Thus, the question is: what is being represented? Could it be the Central Bohemian landscape? The wooded groves? Perhaps the plowed fields? A vegetable garden? Earthworms in compost? Or the mist rising from the river? The remnants of conversations hidden in the shade from the heat? Words that speak of transcendence and generalization? Or those that mention language, map-making, target-throwing, and culture as an epidemic? In paintings, one can move left, right, up, and down—but not forward or backward. The dimension of time is immersed in the subtly vibrating solution of brushstrokes from small and medium-sized brushes, that is, in the present. Emerging on the surface are leaf veins, fungal spores, or the excited Phallus impudicus. The rest of the cosmos—including a single planet, promising dawns, and familiar faces—becomes the food of abstraction. After all, without the ability to abstract, human thought would be something entirely different. The layers of paint accumulate against convention, especially in the darker areas of the paintings. Perhaps something is trying to break free from the shadows. Or maybe it is simply the physical substance of paint asserting itself over its representational role. It is known that Primo Levi once said in an interview that a book must function like a telephone leading out of a hall of mirrors. By analogy, Viktorie Langer’s exhibition is a composition built on distance, clarity, ambiguity, transcendence, and persistence.
Marek Meduna

Viktorie Langer (b. 1988) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2009–2015). Finalist for the Oskar Čepan Prize (2021) and Jindřich Chalupecký Prize (2017). She lives and works in Prague. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including House of Arts, Brno, CZ (2022), Kunsthalle Bratislava, SK (2021), OGV Jihlava, CZ (2021), OGL Liberec, CZ (2018), 8mička, Humpolec, CZ (2018), National Gallery in Prague, CZ (2016).