When Christmas is Closer than the Bones of Smoked Herring
What is usually emphasized with Táňa Kuzmová is her quiet, bashful personality. We are all the more surprised by her drawings, where hidden, apparently un-feminine emotions force their way to the surface. Her drawings, made with strongly gestural strokes of black chalk or ink and subtle color overtones, reveal an affinity with lyrical abstract expressionism. Where the energetic movements lead to – deliberate – ripping of paper, or to its burning by fire, her drawings resemble the work of the post-war Argentine-Italian avant-garde “spatialist” Lucio Fontana. Like some of Táňa’s drawings, the slits in his canvases also have something erotic about them. Through drastic cuts into the canvas, space gets a chance to “enter” the picture. Similarly, many of Táňa’s drawings and works in textile are double-sided, their surface disrupted by openings.
From drawing on paper, she moved seamlessly to linear drawing with threads, to “lineation” on different kinds of material (cardboard, wallpaper, or textiles), in effect deliberately transgressing the boundaries between art forms. She also combines various other techniques, such as collage and assemblage. But she strictly rejects aestheticism, which makes her thinking somewhat aking to punk.
The circle of her friends mostly consisted of figures from the underground and rebels: anarchist and poet Gusto Dobrovodský (her long-time partner, whom she also illustrated books and excerpts from whose poems she used in her textiles), artist Igor Kalný, poet Vladimír Archleb and others, all followers of modernist streams in art.
In contrast to the intellectual expressions of (neo)conceptualism, Táňa Kuzmová strongly prefers handiwork and contact with the material. She mostly takes inspiration from Slovak folk art. She has learned hand weaving since childhood by watching her grandmother in her house near Dudince, and she has been perfecting it, like embroidery, to this day. Yet her embroideries, or as she calls them “šívačky” (no unlike the prints of the somewhat feminist-oriented Klára Bočkayová, created in response to folk embroidery) are far from traditional women’s decorated fabrics that used to adorn the insides of country houses. She adapted traditional techniques (weaving, netting, and felting) and created her own: using fragments of colored yarns, threads, forming lines as though to paint her non-figurative textile images. She also uses this unusual technique in canvas or cloth curtains, coats, skirts, (non-)pillows, caps… She only ever works with natural materials (wool, cotton, broadcloth, etc.) Her handmade woven carpets and tapestries with lyrical-abstract motifs are becoming increasingly lavish in their colorfulness.
The fact that she takes pleasure in using scraps of fabric intended to be thrown away (in effect, recycling them) testifies to her strong ecological motivation, which she has developed ahead of her time. Like Otis Laubert and Ilona Németh, she too creates new works from found objects and all sorts of bits and pieces. These include strings, cardboard, unused wallpapers (former department store samplers) that would have otherwise ended up in a garbage dump (so-called “junk art”). Her handwoven carpets and tapestries, some of which are produced with a technique used in making so-called “zápästky” (folk cuffs), as well as her spatial images are created from wool or pieces of cloth cut from shabby T-shirts.
Besides drawings and textiles, she also makes works in ceramics. Her ceramic objects are equally utility objects. They are earthy and are becoming more and more relaxed in color.
Her wire-wrapped jewelry (also largely made of items found in the nature, such as snail shells, etc.) and objects hark back to the old folk tradition of tinkering.
Tamara Archlebová