Studio Oléne by artist Klára Hosnedlová, a cloakroom disguised as a fashion boutique, is not merely a place to deposit clothes and belongings when you enter the gallery. It also offers various ways to verify, appropriate, or create your own image. This can be done at the rear side of the wall delimiting the cloakroom area that will become a single-work gallery. Its regular variations will expand on topics related to the body, fashion and lifestyle, increasingly addressed by a number of other contemporary artists.

“Cloakrooms in theatres, cinemas and museums have become, over the course of time, a purely practical device that favours fast and easy service. The cloakroom in public institutions is no longer a refuge ‘before entering the scene’, but a place for practical passing from the street inwards, toward the experience itself. A necessary evil.

In Klára Hosnedlová’s concept, however, this utilitarian function becomes one of the dominant elements in the institution. Its ambition is to hold not only the attention, but also the bodies of the visitors, giving them a chance to deal with themselves on different levels. Rather than a practical cloakroom, it is a boudoir or a fashion boutique whose attendant is so discrete that it removes all your shyness and provides enough time for experimenting with your own identity.

On the one hand, the cloakroom performs all the usually required basic functions. On the other, however, it may encourage visitors to stay, to chat and even to act. It sets the time, pointing out that the tasks we deal with – some casually and habitually, others with care and purposefulness (such as taking off one’s coat, checking one’s hairstyle, putting down carried things so as not to be disturbed in other activities) – have their own set rhythm, to which we do not attach any extraordinary significance, but which define our personality. Can we see a formula in them? Can we change them? Improve them? Soften them? Make them rougher?”

Marek Pokorný

Klára Hosnedlová (*1990, Uherské Hradiště, CZ) is a graduate from the studio of Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (2015). The conceptual leitmotif of her work is the interior as an intimate sphere for staging the image of its user, and the ways of its habitation. The settings she creates are fitted with figurative embroidery, also applied to clothing, as her emblematic artistic technique. She has had individual exhibitions at the Polansky Gallery and Hunt Kastner Gallery in Prague, among others. She lives in Berlin and Prague.