The pattern best employed to express the generation of life and energy thrown from the motion of its development is the spiral, a filament twisting outward from a central point along a series of circles concentric to its exterior. As it travels, it revisits places it’s already been, moving at once toward and away from its past. Its prototype in nature is found in vortical motion, from the movement of clouds, smoke, whirlwinds, and whirlpools to the rounds of petal arrangements, spiders spinning webs, and caterpillars twisting silk around their bodies. As small as the double helix of DNA and as large as galaxies, it’s a symbol of the matrix of life and the cycles of cosmic change and creation — renewal, repetition, and regeneration — and so occurs in ever-changing variation across cultures, most strikingly in the visual arts, everywhere from neolithic scrawls to the Ionic volute. More recently, subtle incarnations can be found again and again throughout the practice of artist Klára Hosnedlová.
Projects weave in and out of one another in the artist’s constantly unfurling process, but embroidery is always at the heart of each cycle. Based mostly in Berlin, the Czech artist incorporates intricately embroidered canvases within more expansive retro-futurist compositions, often applying disparate elements from natural forms and brutalist Soviet and Central and Eastern European architecture. Terrazzo paneling, epoxy, hand-blown glass, and fibrous sculptural works house closely cropped and carefully stitched studies of body parts harvested from some private ritual. The immersive installations resulting from this looping process can feel (and often look) like a cocoon, alien nursery, or transformation room: devotional sites potent with the capacity for change.
Hosnedlová herself was spun into being in 1990, and while it’s often noted that she comes from a formerly Soviet country, she grew up in “a small village close to a bigger city and nothing special — normal jobs, normal people, a normal situation.” This normal place lies in Moravia, a region better known for its folklore, good plum brandy, and the blackwater river winding from the Danube to the plains of Northern Europe. The tumid Morava is slow-moving and prone to flood, creating vast, rich ecosystems conducive to viticulture, but for Hosnedlová there were no galleries, no museums, only expansive nature and space to dream. Back then, she made her own clothes and, one imagines, allowed her mind to wander and flow. Her mother (a hairdresser) and father (an auto mechanic) had no connection with the art world themselves but didn’t disparage her creative pursuits, so she moved to Prague to train at the Academy of Fine Arts, studying in the painting studio of Jiří Kovanda. It was at this point that tangential interests in needlework and modernist architecture took hold, culminating in a dissertation on architect Adolf Loos and, in 2016, silk-cotton-embroidered canvases exhibited inside one of the apartment interiors he designed in Pilsen (The Apartment of Dr. Vogl, 2016). These early works were made from found imagery and movie screenshots, then later from photographs staged by Hosnedlová in what became a critical element of her practice.
The following year saw her return to and reinterpret prior work (and the interiors that housed it) for “VOGL” at hunt kastner in Prague. In 2018, she cast her shuttle back again, showing “Ponytail Parlour” at the Prague National Theatre before making embroideries from documentation of that show for “Seated Woman” at Karlin Studios. The year 2019 saw pieces travel outside of the Czech Republic for group shows in Basel (Liste) and Paris (“Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now” at the Fondation Cartier), but it was 2020 that brought her first major solo exhibition and attention from a wider audience. “Nest” (2020–21) at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer, placed the iconic Karel Hubáček-designed Ještěd Tower at the center of a fragmented handmade scenography. The ninety-four-foot concrete relic of Soviet futurism houses a hotel, weather station, and telecoms transmitter while perched atop Mount Ještěd, casting invisible threads of energy and information into the airwaves over Liberec. Of course, the hyperboloid tower itself wasn’t moved to Berlin, but the curve and tone of Ještěd were apparent throughout “Nest” to eerie effect, as if Hosnedlová were mediating some architectonic geist or channeling, Solaris-style, half-forgotten futures long-past. Slab-like floor pieces, a rounded, Brutalist-looking wall integrated with leather bench, chic hand-blown glass and stainless-steel wall sconces, and a freestanding, flickering chandelier-like ringed form all accompanied the artist’s signature embroidered canvases embedded in stainless-steel frames, terrazzo paneling, and mold-melted glass.
Documentation of the installation finds the space used as a backdrop for young, androgynous figures embodying the futuristic allure and nostalgia of the tower. And yet these figures are also ghosts — absent during public exhibition, these were private performers, added later and employed by Hosnedlová as “explorers” in an image-capture ritual or “strategy of performative placemaking.”
“She comes up with this whole setting that she wants to create,” Theurer explains, “and then she has someone taking photos before she crops images from these that she embroiders later as some next iteration. She uses every installation for the next cycle or series of works. Which is almost like they’re not just objects, but links backward and forward in time.” This “setting” has been referred to as “performance,” but it would be more precise to call it a movement document, energy exchange, or image ritual, since nothing is rehearsed or undertaken for an audience per se, but guided by what Igor Hosnedl (Hosnedlová’s husband and sometimes collaborator) refers to as a “sensitivity” possessed by the artist. The first step of any new project, he tells me, is to stage one of these private ritual performances with an individual or group that excites that “sensitivity.” Their movements and interactions with themselves and the surrounding space are then loosely guided by Hosnedlová and photographed. She uses the resultant imagery as source material for her embroidery.
To be intrigued by such a process is to feel the artist’s strands wind tighter around your chest.
Any perspective or position held by the artist and her work feels veiled and secretive, even as it entangles you. Visitors to her 2023 exhibition “To Infinity” at Hanover’s Kestner Gesellschaft saw narrow slivers of embroidery peering from stainless-steel frames through strange epoxy chrysalid forms in one space and great tufts of yarn and linen tow in another — fibers curling into haystack-like monoliths crafted from the same material used for Sound of Hatching during the 2022 Lyon Biennale. These vast, ambiguously organic objects seem borne from an alien plane of intelligence, like the phantasmic intruders of Solaris (1972), Arrival (2016), or author Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014). During “Nest,” Hosnedlová bred silk moths in the gallery, hoping to use their secretions for her embroidery, perhaps finding inspiration for the cocoon-like shapes of vast free-standing epoxy casings in Sakura Silk Moth (Art Basel, 2021). Hosnedlová’s latest body of work will be shown at Kunsthalle Basel, where “GROWTH” promises new glass sculptures and sewn works for her first Swiss solo show and most extensive exhibition to date.
Repeatedly situating the viewer in an unfamiliar landscape of muddy, dingy hues and in a kind of removed or isolated stream of time invites frustration and deliberate alienation. Staring at these structures and ambivalent young bodies in their MacBook-space-grays, influencer isabellines, and vague mauves doesn’t rouse strong feelings of hope or vitality. There is a confounding sense of order, but no spit and no blood, and so, like the tightly cropped subjects of her canvases, the viewer is constrained within an aspirant reality, somewhere just out of reach. A shape without form, shade without color. Paralyzed force and gesture without motion. This overwrought, cyclical process and its hyperaesthetic employs many of the same tactics as fashion and marketing, even placing textile craft and the dark arts of image metaphysics at its center. And something about the work feels highly online, too, like one big, gestural joke about digital “spaces” or the problem of organizing information being inherently architectural.
Before unraveling further, let me pause to say that Hosnedlová’s work has a strange effect on people. Reading other texts about her art unearths fumy prose and artfully veiled bafflement. Something is enticing, sticky, about the tangled web she weaves. I call up a friend to ask what he thought about her work when he saw it in person, and he tells me, among several unusually long pauses, that while it has “an aura,” there is something disturbingly evasive about it. A kind of… withholding. “It feels,” he said, “as though there are zones of things you’re deliberately excluded from knowing about.” The politics of her architectural choices are left obscure, but using the ruins of modernism’s ideological project for something like an Instagram filter or alienation as a Photoshop tool over a craft-based practice feels… seedy. Or, at best, unwittingly cynical. Like the hours I’d spent looking at Hosnedlová’s work, our conversation left me feeling unaccountably sad. The same feeling returned later while reading a text about the Las Vegas Sphere — designed by the architectural firm Populous — by Elena Saavedra Buckley for The Paris Review:
This was the place that I feel to be the center […] where what was imagined, directed, and awesome met the stuff of our world, concrete and plastic and trudging through time. This was where how things might be and how they really are collided, and it let me see that each charge the other with a thin and hot current. They are so close together that there is only a painful space between them. You have to zero in on this glittering edge. You have to look at where the light begins and ends.1
It’s hard to find the glitter in Klára Hosnedlová’s web. There is awe and sadness and strangely disappointed hopes and fragility. Maybe even some pale skein of beauty. But there is no glittering edge. It’s not there yet, but let’s wait another round. For now, the work’s more striking element is its surface texture. Texere: to weave, fabricate — make wicker or wattle framework; and textura: web or structure. In literature, spiraling paths are taken by Theseus and Dante through labyrinths and planes of hell, signaling that an individual’s inner journey is in consistent relationship with the world around them. We weave tangled webs and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes, spin yarns for stories, tie ourselves up in knots, and get things all sewn up, leaving no loose ends until we unravel at the seams, in stitches, hanging by a thread, all the while circling closer to and further from some weft of truth.
