Klara Hosnedlová: Growth

In her work, Klara bridges past and future, tradition and innovation, ancient history and sci-fi. Back in art school, she began to experiment with traditional techniques of silk cotton embroidery, and since then, she’s kept perfecting her technique and making it a central pillar of her work. The process is painstaking, long, and arduous, but that’s precisely what fascinates her about it. And that brings us to another pivotal aspect of her oeuvre: the non-public performances that she later embroiders. 

Being part of the entire process, Hosnedlová designs the actions, builds the brutalist settings that serve as backdrops, and makes the retro-futurist costumes of the performers. She then photographs them, and from those images, she creates a set of embroideries that will be shown in her next exhibition. That way, her work travels in time, a basic element of the sci-fi genre that she loves, and creates a conceptual thread that sews all her works together.

In Growth, her solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, the work expand in time as well as across five different rooms, which feature installations. The embroideries that the audience can admire were made after photographs of her preceding exhibit, To Infinity. In this collection of images, we see a bunch of fragmented bodies – a nude torso, the side of a face, half of an arm. They’re set against infrastructures in her characteristic muted palette: flesh tones, washes of grays, and so on. It makes us wonder about a past civilisation that is no longer here, maybe a non-human organisation that suddenly left. In Klara’s work, we find more questions than answers, and that’s why it’s so appealing.