Lucia Tallová: Moving Clouds
Deutsche Bank "Artist of the Year" 2026

She finds the material for her works at flea markets and in antiquarian bookstores: in illustrated books about the 1974 Spartakiad, in fashion and film magazines from the 1950s, and in books about the temples and sculptures of classical antiquity. By cutting, layering, folding, and reconfiguring, the artist creates collages that always possess a sculptural, object-like quality. She extends this quality three-dimensionally into space. She allows abstract structures made of dyed, crumpled paper to spill out from her collages or combines the paper works with fragments of furniture, charcoal, branches, and stones to form assemblages. In doing so, she deliberately selects materials that have a patina or minor damage and bear traces of wear and tear. This conveys an idea that is as poetic as it is materialist: that history is inscribed in every form of matter, in every material, whether animate or inanimate.

Tallová’s work can be described as that of an archaeologist: a kind of artistic forensics that traces these narratives and connects them to one another. Painting is an essential element of her practice. The abstract compositions that the artist creates on canvas using black acrylic paint and ink are reminiscent of landscapes, clouds, or ash formations. She often combines these paintings with stage-like, minimalist constructions made of wooden slats, which evoke archives, art storage facilities, or cabinets of curiosities.

Tallová’s artistic practice is not only about remembering, but also about what is forgotten and repressed. In her universe, this is above all the history of women: female laborers, athletes, and models whose achievements and lives were not inscribed in the male-dominated canon of modernism and postwar modernism. The collages and assemblages are populated by female bodies and body parts that have become intertwined with all manner of architectures and monuments designed and built by men. Throughout the centuries, women have had to contort themselves to literally bear the burden of patriarchal histories and ideologies.

This becomes particularly clear in the installation Fragility of Caryatids (2025). It consists of a group of bent Ionic columns into which posterlike images of ancient female sculptures, mostly headless torsos, are wedged. Tallová alludes to the gender metaphors embodied in ancient architecture and sculpture. Caryatids are female sculptures that serve a loadbearing function in architecture, used in place of a column or pillar. Unlike their male counterparts, the Atlanteans, they must support the weight with grace, without showing any physical exertion. In Tallová’s version, they do not resign themselves to this fate.

Even as the artist plays with the idea that history repeats itself in different variations within the same cycles, her work has an anarchic and rebellious quality. The monolithic and monumental are countered by the fragmentary utopia of a feminine, non- hierarchical history—a world in which everything is interconnected and interdependent, where the cycles do not endlessly repeat the hardships and acts of violence of the past, but instead open up the possibility of a future for our planet.

Curator: Britta Färber, Global Head, Art & Culture, Deutsche Bank