Lena Gallovičová

Cult of Luna

Šopa Gallery is going to present the show of Lena Luga Gallovičová, a photographer and a visual artist, on December 13th – St. Lucia’s Day. Lena’s exhibition is an interactive experience involving all senses. Her scenic installation includes photos acting as objects, natural flowers, and performative scenes.

Lena Luga is driven by her intuition. She does not offer clear verbal hints to get to the bottom of her art. Her photographs bear the form of evocative portraits of both her friends and strangers, of- ten in natural surroundings (predominantly near water), in fact resulting from improvised perform- ative situations between the models and the author, who admits that the photographed persons significantly affect the final looks of the resulting photos.

Water is an element overflowing with symbolism. It represents subconsciousness, darkness, mys- tery, and contrary to solid ground, where everything is visible and ordered with clearly defined contours. At the same time, it is the cleansing and healing essence of life – after all, the life originat- ed in water. Water stimulates human imagination with its elusiveness and gave birth to countless aquatic beings on the verge between a human, animal and spiritual entity. Also, the figures in Lena’s photos resemble fairies, mermaids, and ethereal sprites.

Lena intertwines surrealistic visuals with pursuing one’s roots into a multimedia aggregate. She naturally layers the pre-Christian and Christian mythology, symbolism, and traditions on her per- sonal history. One of her strengths is eclecticism, which allows her to combine diverse visual forms of expression – historicizing references to symbolism, surrealism, and cabinets of curiosities visual- ized via a digital, almost trashy aesthetics.

These colorful, cross-genre yet consistent artifacts contain one extra dimension – Lena Luga demonstrates her exhibition as a ritual or suggests how an up-to-date functional ritual might look like. Conventional forms are losing their substance, and it is the fine arts that give us common grounds where beauty may become one with spirituality and traditions that may join authentic individual experience.

-AT-

Lena Gallovičová / Luga (born in 1985) – a photographer and artist. She studied at the Studio of Con- temporary Painting, Faculty of Arts, Technical University in Košice (2008–2014). The focus of her art lies in overlapping experimental photography with free art. Her most beloved sources of inspiration are portraits, landscapes, human figures, intimacy, and emotions. For two years, she has been half of an artistic duo with Denis Baštuga that made rise to an artistic platform called Nephro studio.

The exhibitions of this gallery are supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council.

The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

This project is supported by the Košice City.