Biography

Katarína Alexy Fígerová is one of the outstanding representatives of the contemporary generation who entered Slovak art in the 1980s. Her artistic expression was naturally influenced by the times associated with the manifestation of new European painting tendencies of the late 1970s and 1980s. Initially graphic, but later especially painterly work is characterised by a rare combination of postmodernist tendencies. Her artistic expression combines American gestural painting with the American Expressionism of the 1940s, especially the way in which Willem de Kooning, for example, interpreted reality. Without any violent connections to this artist, I see the nature of the expressions in some of the artist’s works as identical, despite the fact that they are separated by a large time span and other artistic and social contexts. What they have in common, however, is that their work exploits the emotional symbolic potential of fundamental aspects of the painting process, namely gesture, colour, form and texture.

In works such as Red Circle, 2015, Jazz Guitar from St. Germain, 2016, Ariadne’s Thread in the Dream Maze, 2017 or A Day in Sóller, 2022, Flower for… 2022, the suggestive colour expression is translated into a metaphorical language and an imaginative play of symbols and signs. In Last Night’s Dream, 2019, Carussel, 2021, or Golden Dutch Tulips, 2023, he brings to mind powerful experiences and inspirations from literature, music, and distant exotic lands. He puts them in diverse planes, layers, varies and overlaps them. They are emblematic of Alexy Fíger’s semantic contrast of sensory and felt perception of reality. Bold colour tones applied with a lively painterly handwriting intermingle with a dynamically guided line. Assemblages and collages take on an embossed, almost three-dimensional form, sculptures are increasingly boldly sculpted, where metal is vigorously shaped, bent, sheared and welded.

From her earliest paintings, she was characterised by an intellectual interest in the knowledge of the world, its fauna and flora. Works such as Two Roosters, Big Fish in the Pond (both from 2016), Owl Who Can Read, Fish of Secret Wishes (both from 2019) are just a few examples of her humorous interpretations from the natural world. However, she is also attracted by the atmosphere of the time, the babel of time with its intense experience of reality and its attempts to establish a dialogue with the contemporary currents of civilization. She naturally appropriates means of expression that emphasize the explosive power of contrasting and luminous colors, the tension between layers and structures, which she brings into the space in her paintings and sculptures.

The Council uses the expressiveness of line and shape, as well as the monumentality of the pictorial message, along with found objects – the objet trouvé that she inserts into the pictorial space. Wassily Kandinsky once said of his work: “One day I realized that objects were detrimental to my painting.” They do not harm Katka, on the contrary, they add to the narrative value of her work. She puts in them things found in antique shops, in garbage dumps, on the street, but also objects that remind her of certain nice and beautiful experiences, amazing situations with friends and acquaintances – One Day on Palau Island, 2015, Spanish Summer, 2018, Paloma Negra, 2023. In her paintings we find embedded brushes, playing cards, lace, a painter’s palette, a violin, a gramophone record, as well as iron or sand – Voice from the Gramophone, 2019, Distracted Owl, Owl Sonata (both from 2022). The painterly gesture of the brush is often amplified by the use of a spatula or just the handwriting of his fingers.

The extrovertedness of her painterly expression is always combined with the introvertedness of her intellect. Naturally, like every artist, she has undergone an important human and artistic development, various changes and transformations in her life. It may seem that her decision to study at the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts in Bratislava will significantly influence her further artistic direction. This is indeed the case, because she likes to draw. Classical drawing manifests itself not only in graphic art, but also in painting, where she precisely defines a geometric shape or a stylized form of the human figure. The variation of different geometric elements, together with the expressiveness of the painter’s handwriting, had a strong influence both in her early work and especially in her later paintings, especially those that expressed transformations of structures, changes of forms and variety of shapes.

Katka Alexy Fígerová, as a very perceptive person and artist, often uses an age-old symbol in her works – the circle, which is considered to be the perfect shape symbolizing the origin of life. It has no beginning or end, therefore it is a symbol of eternity, God and unity. In terms of masculine and feminine principles, it is a symbol of femininity, feminine energy, spirit and strength. It signifies the cycle of the sun, moon, earth, karma or the circle of life. The Odyssey Cycle, 2022 or Variations, 2023 are such a cycle of stories.

In the work of Katka Alexy Fígerová, colour surfaces often overlap, seemingly helping us to enter unknown distances, while others mysteriously approach us. They symbolize the dialectic of the connection of her experiences, ideas and dreams, but also intellectual play and spiritual self-awareness. Light, which has defined the dark surfaces with their respective boundaries, also sets the rules in sculptural works such as Game of Thrones, 2020, Night Butterfly, 2021 or the magical paintings Garden of the Winter Solstice, 2018 and Garden on the Coast, 2023. As in all of the artist’s works in these works, the titles themselves suggest the essential meaning of the content.

Kandinsky’s words from his book On Spirituality in Art are appropriate to the whole artistic work of Katka Alexy Fíger: “Colour is a means of immediate influence on the soul. Colour is a keyboard. The eye is the striking hammer. The soul is a piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which, by striking this or that key, causes the soul to vibrate.”
Her paintings and sculptures are proof of this.