Šimon Sýkora, Siggi Sekira

The conceptual framework for this presentation delves into the notion of utopias, via changing political landscapes of the past recent decades, and a contemporary take or retelling of the present day trials of living and participating in hyper capitalism. Sýkora will include a series of works that build upon themes within his oeuvre, such as precarity, class struggle, shifting landscapes, and more specifically, the gig economy labor force. Siggi Sekira will present a number of new ceramic sculptures situated on the floor or on bespoke pedestals that reference aesthetic tendencies prominent in post USSR Ukraine, and recontextualize, as well as deconstruct their symbolic meanin gs in order to make room for new possibilities.

Siggi Sekira (b. 1987 in Odessa, Ukraine, lives and works in Vienna) has been studying at the Master’s program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2015. Her artistic practice includes ceramic sculpture and colored pencil drawings. Sekira draws on the Slavic my thology of the Wiener Werkstätten around 1900, Soviet avant garde, and and the influx of the Western pop culture after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her drawings Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Bilingual with Kalle Lindmark. Soyuz, Pescara, IT (2019) and Contrappunto (alongside Danielle Pamp), Vin Vin gallery, Vienna, AT (2021). Her work was shown in group exhibitions such as Sweet Lies at Ludwig Forum Aachen (2021); Cruel Summer Camp at Exile, Vienna (2020); Rhizome at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (2020) and Fever Dream at Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2019).

Šimon Sýkora (b. 1990 in Pilsen, Czech Republic, lives and works in Vienna) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 2019. Sýkora’s spookily melancholic paintings explore the hazy realms of wanderers and misfits. Existing in a reality that is almost violently Bataillean, the artist’s work explores the more internalized notions of the human condition, which is rather imperceptible, but agonizingly present and powerful in shaping one’s reality. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Wasteland’, at Gallery GASK, Kutná Hora, CZ (2021), Turning Stranger, Polansky Gallery, Brno, CZ (2020), ‘Eyes closed, Fingers down’, Gallery Pragovka, Prague, CZ (2020), Logika nevolnosti, (with Martin Kyrych), Gallery Jelení, Prague, CZ (2020), and ‘Poem to a Horse’, Gallery 209, Brno, CZ (2019). His work has been shown in group exhibitions at U10 Artspace, Belgrade (2021), The Hole, New York (2020), AM180 Gallery, Prague, CZ (2019), and Lume Laboratory, Milan (2019).