JITKA HANZLOVA – ONE TO ONE
2015-04-20Developed between 2007 and 2014, the exhibitionʼs images meditate on the figure of the horse, a subject as old as the history of art, and express the artistʼs profoundly personal relationship with these animals while renewing the role of the horse as a subject for artistic exploration.
The title One to One refers to the relationship between human and horse, which must remain equal despite their inequity in physical power, for over six thousand years. As Jesus Carrillo Castillo notes in his essay for the retrospective catalog Jitka Hanzlová, “Images of horses in the media and in the collective imagination, where they have evolved since childhood, are much more deep-rooted than our experience of the actual animal…Hanzlováʼs photographs set out to return to a state in which the depiction of the horse is united with an intense experience of it and to a time when the experience of the horse was in turn linked to many other, equally lost experiences.”
Drawing on her own life story, Hanzlováʼs photography subtly explores the ways in which home and surroundings indelibly shape identity. It constitutes an imaginative investigation of ʻbelongingʼ at the turn of the twentieth century. Born and raised in former Communist Czechoslovakia, Hanzlová fled to Essen, Germany in her early 20s where she lives and works today. This
essential experience is reflected in all of her series. In One to One, Hanzlová portrays the horse:seen at a distance within its environment, in its own reality as an individual. She also conveys her emotional response to her subject through enigmatic images of details. An ear, a rump, a mane, a tail, all intently observed, relay the artistʼs deeply felt, visceral experience of the animal. The images are evidence of familiarity with and proximity to the horse conjuring its mystery and otherness of being. As Hanzlová notes, “Their stillness seems to be endless, far in their own time.”
Opposite – Untitled, 2010
Exhibition runs through to 2nd, 2015
Yancey Richardson
525 West 22nd Street
New York
10011 NY
