"Does death come alone, / or with eager reinforcements?" - so begin the lyrics of Fire of the Mind by the experimental British band Coil, which gave the title to this exhibition. Just as Coil conceived of music as a magical act and a tool for transforming consciousness, Lucie Hošková approaches her artwork as an occult ritual of its own. Her aesthetics is built on the collision of contradictory schemes. Matter struggles with decay, existence with non-existence, reason with madness and love with libido, with the latter always triumphing. But these roles are not defined in black and white - the Dionysian principle of animal man can represent freedom and life, while the Apolline principle of mathematically rational angels leads us towards destruction. 

Hošková and Coil draw on William Blake's mythology, where cold conventional reason personified in the tyrannical figure of Urizen represents a satanic force akin to Milton's Satan. Death is symmetrical and logical, whereas man on the wavelength of the beast is part of nature. Good and evil are not opposites but Siamese twins. As with listening to the mantra-hypnotic text "Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy," Hošková is unsure whether this is a celebration of the Christian God or an indictment of him. 

A key source of inspiration for the author is the supernatural visions of St. Hildegard of Bingen and St. Teresa of Avila. While St. Hildegard, in her religious rapture, had a vision of a living cosmic flame called Ignis vivens, St. Therese experienced violent mystical-erotic trances in which a seraphim stabbed a golden spear into her body, at the end of which glowed fire. Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicted this motif of ecstatic intoxication with paralyzing pain, where the mortified body suffers agonizingly but the disembodied soul ascends to the heavens, in his Baroque sculpture.

Hoskova, however, uses plain, shabby and seemingly hideous materials such as exhumed textile canvases worn by erosion instead of showy marble. Just as the masochistically tortured body of a flagellant unlocks the gates of paradise to the exalted spirit, Hošková "tortures" the matter of her works to make their spiritual content stand out. Decay and disintegration here represent the necessary condition for further future transformation. She refers to the first stage of the alchemical transformation called nigredo, which is symbolized by the black sun, mentioned by the band Coil in their song.

The sacred in the artist's work is intertwined with the transgression of taboos and the breaking of the collapsing order. The body here is not idealised but dysfunctional, mutilated, grotesque. Sexuality is perceived as irrational and repulsive, bringing only exhaustion and disappointed ahedonic states instead of inner satisfaction. The path to transcendence is paved with experiences of pain, and the search for the beauty of the spirit leads through the destruction of the body. This is evident in the artist's methodical deterioration of the structure of her artworks.

In Hošková's work, man is not a harmonious and whole being, but a violent fusion of mutually incompatible parts subject to rapid biological destruction. He is a too tightly knotted knot of a soul yearning for pleroma and a body sinking into the grave. Can human life, then, be considered one long existential scream between birth and death? Or is there, after all, that pure fire of the mind that fills the transparent spaces in Baudelaire's poem The Ascent? Let us look for the answer in the glimpses of the axis on its quivering orbit to the stars...

curator: Kamil Princ