"Disturbing landscape" 

In August 2022, Ukrainian artist Danya Kovach will use the Jan Arnold Gallery as a temporary studio for her work. During this period, Kovacs will work on one of the existing series of works and in the process will translate the role of an undervalued object into a semantically restructured visual language. With his tools, he makes a household object that is literally trampled on every day in ordinary life - a rug. In a serial composition, the prints of the rubber mats are completed as a single unit and placed on the canvas.

 In this series of works, carpets are used from his family's temporary accommodation in Vienna, Austria. The process creates a multi-color monoprint that is stretched and transferred from horizontal to vertical when finished. The usual Ukrainian steppe landscape is visible in the background. The break with the main function of the object should lead to a discourse about its role as an ever-present witness at the open, unwanted or necessary thresholds of socio-culturally created spaces. In his previous projects, Danylo works with various topics. For example, rugs from police stations, state border facilities, or churches were transformed into artist's tools, which after use appear, arranged in a reportable manner, as impressions of these realities in a grid structure that usually appears obstructive. This aesthetic is disrupted because it is painted together on an image medium with blurred but very colorful landscape images in the background.
A large-format painting will be created in the Open Studio of the Jan Arnold Gallery, which will occupy the entire exhibition hall (2x6m). The central work of the exhibition creates a direct connection to the place where it was created with rugs collected in Vienna. Once borrowed, the mats return to their original purpose and find their place again, where friends greet each other, push prisoners or doors remain locked.

The project was realised at MuseumsQuartier Vienna by "Jan Arnold Gallery". curator Sebastian Schager

Materials: Canvas, acrylic, letterpress carpet print, typographic ink.

Year of execution: 2022.

all works remain altered after the flood in the art studio