Collagevillage

Marta Matus, a talented illustrator, presents a world composed of layers, pieces, and colorful fragments.

Such a world exists.
It is inhabited by people who are “assembled” from pieces of other people. Really. And they live in houses “stitched together” from
pieces of other houses. In them, they have flowers that grow nowhere else but there, because they are “combined” from different species. It’s as if someone in that world first collected something, threw it into a pile, then tore it apart, cut it up,
sliced it, simply destroyed it, and on top of that mixed it all together… only to then heal it, mend it, and support it.
Marta Matus.
She does it.

Collages are (so far) the key principle for her. She usually works with them in the “old-fashioned” way – using various existing materials, but also in the “new” way, digitally – when she first has to come up with what she will use
and then break it down into its basic forms and reassemble it.
It is worth standing next to them and watching “how it’s done.” It is worth standing next to her and watching “how it’s done.” It is calm and kind mastery and hard work at the same time. We watch and literally see how she glued, mixed, assembled… and more. To make us feel like we are in a story, to blur the line between “real” and “imaginary,” she manipulates scale and perspective, tilts and swirls. And it’s not just putting together
different elements; she works with their height, mass, and layers until the space is filled to bursting, until everything speaks.

It’s interesting – after all, collage as a technique disappeared from books for a long time, perhaps even an entire generation, and its pioneers from the 1960s, such as Irena
Tarasová, Viera Bombová, and Jarmila Čihánková, were almost forgotten. Marta Matus breathed new life into it and gave it
a contemporary identity.

It’s our world. Take a closer look. You can. It’s here, almost within reach.

The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Municipal Library of Piešťany and Toto! je galéria.