{"id":57451,"date":"2021-03-15T10:16:14","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T16:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=57451"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:30:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T02:30:05","slug":"lenka-konopaseks-attraction-to-beautiful-disasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/lenka-konopaseks-attraction-to-beautiful-disasters\/","title":{"rendered":"Lenka Konopasek’s Attraction to Beautiful Disasters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Oil Platform Explosion”<\/p><\/div>\n

Lenka Konopasek is always blowing things up or burning them down. Her beguiling works in paint or sculpted paper, now in a solo show at Nox Contemporary, make manifest that disaster is her thing, her oeuvre \u2014 but why is<\/em> that? We arranged to meet at Nox to discuss it.<\/h4>\n

In addition to a longtime partnership with Utah sculptor Cordell Taylor (they met at the U of U in 1990) and a teenage son with solid artistic sensibilities (he capably critiques his mother\u2019s work, she says, and claims a Superman film he had them watch together \u2014 wherein the world is destroyed \u2014 was a major influence on her work), Konopasek is also adjunct art faculty at both the U and Westminster College \u2014 so our meeting took some juggling of schedules. But here we are at 11ish on a sunny Monday with gallery owner John Sproul at hand as a bonus.<\/h4>\n
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“Dark Cloud”<\/p><\/div>\n

Walking in, the dynamism to this expressive show is evident, not merely the volatility apparent in any single work but also in a strong rhythm to the way the pieces have been hung (by Sproul) that makes you want to keep looking back over your shoulder as you move around the intimate space. Pleasing paper sculptures (smaller in scale than we\u2019ve come to expect from this artist) seemingly held up by complex fragile wooden stick supports are placed where they will capture the most attention. This show of Konopasek\u2019s is big (but not crowded) and colorful \u2014 all those fires and explosions, you know.<\/h4>\n

And the artist, who guards her privacy, eventually will tell us \u2014 after a lot of provocation and some deep thought \u2014 that 2003 is when it all began.<\/h4>\n
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“Regrets”<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cFor me, overall, I remember when I first went to the U I had a different palette from the American students because in Europe how I remember the landscape [with some nostalgia involved, she acknowledges] \u2014 there are the fields and the muddiness and a rawness of the landscape. It\u2019s much more intimate because it\u2019s on a smaller scale, but it just feels<\/em> different than the landscape here. Here I feel more exposed,\u201d says Konopasek. \u201cSo, there is just this strange connection for me between the colors of the European landscape and sort of a history of internal thinking and the types of thinking I grew up with \u2014 some of the Czech artists, Romanticism, how the landscape is being portrayed [she finds portrayals of early American landscape by Bierstadt and his ilk unreliable, too romanticized], there are these different influences in my work about what is reality and what isn\u2019t. I think that there is an element that is always about light that comes out of the landscape that makes it look more interesting than it is.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The artist says one aspect of her work is that she finds it \u201cextremely frustrating that instead of recycling and trying to preserve nature we are imposing more and more on it and I don\u2019t see how it can go on. I am a very anxious person, and it gets me down. Even the new directives that say we cannot recycle this, we cannot recycle that . . . In Germany, when I lived there, they were recycling 30 years ago. They had [specific] bins for everything. That\u2019s one thing. Another? It\u2019s so hard to find pure nature anymore. I love to go to the mountains. I live in a city and it\u2019s important to have access. The work I am doing is influenced by my own anxiety. I don\u2019t see it as gloom because I do find beauty in it. I am sort of going back and forth between those two ideas. I am painting my way through it.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Mutation”<\/p><\/div>\n

Konopasek offers that some works in the show are older and some are new. \u201cI had John [Sproul] help me pick the work. I think that\u2019s really important because I am just too close to it,\u201d she explains.<\/h4>\n

\u201cThis one is a rollercoaster,” she says, pointing to a large work of deconstructed track and hints of carny-ride cars strewn about the area.\u201dOn some level, it\u2019s very organic. The light sort of shines out of the painting \u2013 it goes back to the Bierstadt idea,\u201d says Konopasek. \u201cI like the light that sort of shines out of the painting. I like that quality. At the same time, it\u2019s that strange light that isn\u2019t realistic. That pre-storm light that is sort of greenish,\u201d she adds. (And it is eerie, that glow.) \u201cSo, they have ideas,\u201d she says, referencing the painters of the early West, \u201cbut in some sense they are sort of completing each other.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Rollercoaster”<\/p><\/div>\n

Konopasek sometimes works from photographs and says that over the years, \u201cI\u2019ve had to create a series instead of just painting one work and moving on.\u201d She changes the colors drastically, she says, and avoids creating realistic images.\u201dIf I try to paint too realistically I get bored, because you sort of know how it\u2019s going to work out. I started all of them in basic ugly colors, Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna — mixed together, so they started very monochromatic and just so dark. In my own head, as I was working, I was thinking, \u2018Yeah, I am making some really ugly paintings. So, I go on adding things in and taking them out and there is just something about the process of painting \u2013 I like to be challenged by it. Otherwise, it doesn\u2019t work. Because if I\u2019m bored, it\u2019s a boring painting and other people are bored by it, too.\u201d<\/h4>\n

That still doesn\u2019t answer the question of why she burns down the perfectly beautiful mansion in the painting before us. Why not just paint the mansion in its glory? \u201cOh, it\u00a0did<\/em> burn down,\u201d she rushes to assure us. \u201cAnd it was actually an art museum in some Victorian mansion in Georgia or somewhere and I was just intrigued by the idea of the whole thing burning down -\u2014 and I think it\u2019s about how we value certain things and what happens when artwork is destroyed.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“House on Fire”<\/p><\/div>\n

Konopasek explains that things don\u2019t have to be visual to catch her attention, sometimes it is a headline in a newspaper or magazine that grabs her. \u201cBecause English is my third or fourth language, it\u2019s like \u2018what does that phrase mean if you break it down word by word? What would it mean in Czech?\u201d Konopasek once spoke fluent German and is re-learning that language as well as Italian during the Pandemic. Czech is her native language; her English is excellent.<\/h4>\n

We come to “Debris Pile #4,” a striking oil of fire and smoke and glowing sky and then enter an anteroom filled with more fire and destruction, the first work we encounter a stellar painting of a burning oil platform: \u201cI was taken with these giant manmade structures falling into the sea,\u201d says Konopasek. \u201cThe process of creating them is fascinating but when something goes wrong …\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Debris Pile #4”<\/p><\/div>\n

So, what did<\/em> get her on this path of fire and destruction, we ask again? \u201cIt started right around 2003, with me being in the U.S. and all these friends sending me images of everything being underwater because they had the worst flooding ever. And a lot of those images were aerial views, and it was so crazy because you would see, like, the tops of trees poking out of the water. Whole cities were underwater. It wasn\u2019t just Czech Republic, it was the whole of Europe underwater, it wasn\u2019t even being shown here as much.<\/h4>\n

\u201cFor me, being that far away and seeing these images I thought it was crazy, I mean how could that happen? But looking at those images, it was so beautiful, because you get all those reflections with oil spills making beautiful colorful drawings on the water \u2014 so you have these two realities: On one hand, you have a beautiful image and on the other hand the complete destruction and almost the inability to comprehend that it\u2019s happening.<\/h4>\n
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“Forgetting”<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cSo, I started painting from those images and all those paintings had the really airy sort of colors because I would sometimes invert the colors or change the curves or strange color variations to create the idea of uneasiness, but I think that\u2019s where it started. I really loved those images and was feeling sad that I loved those images so much. And then I started looking for different images that were of different disasters and different consequences and hoping that the images will make people think of some of these disasters. But I am trying to approach them with beautiful images because it\u2019s easier to sort of enter into it.\u201d<\/h4>\n

It seems that shock and awe will continue to be Konopasek\u2019s focus, at least for the present. You can see what she does by appointment and during a second opening of her show,\u00a0Debris Pile Landscapes<\/em> on Gallery Stroll night, March 19, 6 p.m. at Nox Contemporary.<\/h4>\n
<\/div>\n
Lenka Konopasek: Debris Pile Landscapes<\/em>, Nox Contemporary, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 2.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lenka Konopasek is always blowing things up or burning them down. Her beguiling works in paint or sculpted paper, now in a solo show at Nox Contemporary, make manifest that disaster is her thing, her oeuvre \u2014 but why is that? We arranged to meet at Nox to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":57454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[1437,77,100],"class_list":["post-57451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-john-sproul","tag-lenka-konopasek","tag-nox-contemporary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Debris-Pile-4.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 08:37:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57451"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97292,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57451\/revisions\/97292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}