Lucia Tallová was born in 1985 in Bratislava, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and where she continues to live and work. Since 2023, a prominent figure from the international art world has been invited to select artists for the "Artist of the Year" award, with this role rotating every two years. The Slovak artist was nominated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
The title of Lucia Tallová’s exhibition, Moving Clouds, evokes clouds endlessly moving across the sky, embodying the perpetual cycle of becoming and passing away. In her work, however, “moving” also refers to an emotional and inner movement: the experience of being touched by the world, by its beauty as well as by its increasing destruction.
At first glance, Tallová’s room-filling installation for the PalaisPopulaire appears to be an almost surreal journey into the past. Yet the artist is ultimately concerned with a highly personal examination of the present. Her works explore memory, layers of history, and the ways in which the past continues to exist within the present. She interweaves personal and collective narratives with references to art history, architecture, and the legacy of modernism. Her works reflect the profound transformations of recent decades: the collapse of political systems, the disappearance of industrial worlds, technological change, ecological threats, and the increasing vulnerability of democratic societies.
From a feminist perspective, Tallová examines human civilization and the patriarchal structures that have shaped it. She traces a history in which the oppression and marginalization of women are inseparable from the exploitation of nature. In response, she develops new, associative forms of storytelling and archiving. The wooden structures that house her collages, paintings, and assemblages resemble expansive tableaux, but also improvised archives or fragments of a theatrical set. The bent columns of the central sculpture group Fragility of Caryatid (2025) likewise evoke the atmosphere of a stage production.
Using found objects, pages from books and magazines, paper, wood, and photography, Tallová creates an immersive Gesamtkunstwerk that engages poetically and critically with the fragility of memory in an accelerated, digitized present.
Home
Audio
Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.
Lucia Tallová was born in 1985 in Bratislava, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and where she continues to live and work. Since 2023, a prominent figure from the international art world has been invited to select artists for the "Artist of the Year" award, with this role rotating every two years. The Slovak artist was nominated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
The title of Lucia Tallová’s exhibition, Moving Clouds, evokes clouds endlessly moving across the sky, embodying the perpetual cycle of becoming and passing away. In her work, however, “moving” also refers to an emotional and inner movement: the experience of being touched by the world, by its beauty as well as by its increasing destruction.
At first glance, Tallová’s room-filling installation for the PalaisPopulaire appears to be an almost surreal journey into the past. Yet the artist is ultimately concerned with a highly personal examination of the present. Her works explore memory, layers of history, and the ways in which the past continues to exist within the present. She interweaves personal and collective narratives with references to art history, architecture, and the legacy of modernism. Her works reflect the profound transformations of recent decades: the collapse of political systems, the disappearance of industrial worlds, technological change, ecological threats, and the increasing vulnerability of democratic societies.
From a feminist perspective, Tallová examines human civilization and the patriarchal structures that have shaped it. She traces a history in which the oppression and marginalization of women are inseparable from the exploitation of nature. In response, she develops new, associative forms of storytelling and archiving. The wooden structures that house her collages, paintings, and assemblages resemble expansive tableaux, but also improvised archives or fragments of a theatrical set. The bent columns of the central sculpture group Fragility of Caryatid (2025) likewise evoke the atmosphere of a stage production.
Using found objects, pages from books and magazines, paper, wood, and photography, Tallová creates an immersive Gesamtkunstwerk that engages poetically and critically with the fragility of memory in an accelerated, digitized present.
Further artworks from this exhibition
Fragile worlds made of paper
Material and memory
Male fantasies, female bodies
Between new beginnings and decline