Lucia Tallová (b.1985) is a Bratislava-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice oscillates between painting, installation, collage, and photography. Working with personal artefacts and found materials, she (re)arranges them into collaged structures, creating a layered dialogue between medium and meaning through these poetic systems. The focal theme in her oeuvre is memory: asking the open questions of how we preserve, alter, or lose memory over time. Tallová offers contemplative spaces for the viewer to reflect on such a passage and its influence on objects as well.
Tallová graduated from the Department of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, where she still lives and works today. Her history with painting has left its mark – she takes inspiration from the Romantic period, historical developments in landscape painting, as well as the urban environment surrounding her and natural scenery. She has established a distinct method of treating the medium of using water and its unruly character to distribute black acrylic paint on paper, she allows the colour to morph into ethereal abstract shapes, reminiscent of the landscapes that inspire her.
“Whilst the painting remains ever-present, and is still the focal element, it takes on the role of the narrator in the intimate storytelling that resonates through Tallová’s installation; the stories carried and whispered by the structures she arranges.”
From here, Tallová works towards connecting the classical medium of painting with her current site-specific installations, increasingly projecting and moving her work into the space. Her installation Looking Through (2020) combines free-standing wooden grids with paintings, crumpled masses of paper, and the sense of voyeurism, as one looks through what must’ve once been a wall. Whilst the painting remains ever-present, and is still the focal element, it takes on the role of the narrator in the intimate storytelling that resonates through Tallová’s installation; the stories carried and whispered by the structures she arranges.
She creates a material yet thoughtful relationship between the themes and techniques she employs. The distinct symbols that repeat become layered motifs: black ink, the slit of light in the fog, crumpled masses of dust and smoke clouds, stained wooden frames and windows, blurred horizons, and gentle elements peeking under heavy blankets of sentiment. Elements emerging from or fading into empty plains of space become a field of contradiction between minimal invasion and broad, heavy gestures. The black and white pieces of the city and its industrial architecture infuse a sense of nostalgia, as if looking at the faded remains of a life once lived. The nostalgic feeling is reinforced through the personal items and antiques collected during her work process. This combination of two opposing experiences – the impersonal urban and the tender, dreamy landscapes adds an underlying contradiction to the experience of her works. I’m the Land, you are the Sea is an installation from 2019 that exemplifies these entangled constructions of furniture, objects, paintings, photographs, and wooden structures, and the contradictions they morph into harmony.
“With the outcome and remnants she (re)interprets; materials often viewed as useless, she offers a new purpose – the right to a new life.”
The phases and transformations memory moves through become the basis for Tallová’s intricate fictional archives of anonymous people – built of old photographs, postcards, albums, or any other collected items. These archives herald new systems, determined precisely by her collecting, storing, arranging, glueing, cutting, and rearranging their various materials. Her objects are precisely arranged on a network of shelves, which in turn offer the framework of the composition, moving beyond bare functionality. Working with meticulous intentionality, Tallová applies this protocol to each installation, while being aware of the different spatial specificities – new incarnations of the archives are brought about, answering to the character of the environment.
With the outcome and remnants she (re)interprets; materials often viewed as useless, she offers a new purpose – the right to a new life. By manipulating such archival, sentimental material, she manages to oppose the conventional lifespan of objects, and as such, their perceived value.
Diving into the building blocks of her practice, she focuses on the importance of photography in her process: she deliberately centres on mistakes in photographs, whether they be blurred, ill-composed, or traces of time on the paper. These errors carry an air of the everyday she strives to capture in her archive – a repetitive dance between permanence and transience. In her own words, “One of the most important goals I have set for myself is sincerity in living and portraying”. Old photographs, like other antiquarian objects and surfaces, are not merely an accurate recording of a past; by amplifying them, giving them a form and a new plasticity, they overflow into the present. Tallová reimagines, fabulates, and repurposes the past, granting it an evocative power and framing it as a carrier of precious timelessness.
The personal facet of her practice naturally extends to themes of identity – whether it be her ancestry and history, social standing, or her identity as a woman. She acknowledges reality is filtered through people’s personal experiences, and so is hers – emphasising the artist’s role as being mainly about responsibility, she seeks to make visible pressing topics such as the ecological crisis and the position of women in society. “I identify as a woman and a female author. It is equally important for me that the viewer be able to read from my work that it was created by a female author”, she explains.
This is also why womanhood takes on a central role in her work – her pieces often depict women through portraits or figures. The woman plays the main character, through whom Tallová personalises herself. In other instances, especially in her collages and old photographic portraits, she thematises the historical position of women and their social roles – as mothers and housewives, who have been seen mainly as an accessory to the household. Inspired by her experiences, historical research and her environment, this personal lens layers an intimacy, as well as a sense of urgency to her work.
Tallová wholeheartedly engages with the character of the space she’s exhibiting in. She takes it upon herself to create site-specific environments by reconfiguring its architectural elements or giving new life to found furniture. Her collections and collages reside in an intricately designed stage, which forms a relationship to the gallery space and unifies the airs of the past and present. The emphasis she places on the importance of such immersive spaces in mediating the engagement with her work manages to guide the viewer through the foggy borderlands between personal memory and collective history.
“Tallová wholeheartedly engages with the character of the space she’s exhibiting in. She takes it upon herself to create site-specific environments by reconfiguring its architectural elements or giving new life to found furniture.”
For instance, her installation House on the Cliff (2017) exemplifies this monumental combination of set, architecture, and artistic interference. Taking into account the specificities of At Home Gallery, in Šamorín, Slovakia, she utilised the solemnity and grandiose atmosphere to extend her piece above the viewers. The towering work, perched on top of a wooden construction, stands illuminated by multiple small lamps – a contradiction between a billboard-reminiscent construction, the environment surrounding it, and Tallová’s characteristic ephemeral abstraction.
Within the larger sculptural and architectural frameworks of her pieces, archiving and collecting also feature as leitmotifs, diffusing through her work a sense of reawakened emotional and historical resonance. And although the main element of the installations is the act of intuitive collecting and its cyclicality, there is an undeniable life brought to the work by immersing the surrounding architecture and moving visitors in her memory storage.
Tallová has been granted several prestigious awards, recently including the NOVUM Foundation Art Award (2021) and the Tatra Banka Foundation Art Award (2016), as well as taking part in the 16th Biennale de Lyon (2022). She has participated in multiple international artist residencies, amongst which the Telegraph Gallery in Olomouc, Czech Republic (2025), Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France (2020), Artist in Residence at Karla Osorio Gallery in Brasília, Brazil (2019), and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California (2018).
