MICHAELA ŠINDLEROVÁ IS GETTING OUT OF THE MIRROR MAZE
Don’t Mirror Back, Enzyme Collective’s 2026 group exhibition at Koppel Project, begins from an uneasy thought: language has become “hyper affirmative”, repeating itself without being able to find new meanings. The collective describes it as a mirror maze, the same problem Nietzsche described in 1873 when he described modern language as a series of “metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power, coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal”. Michaela Šindlerová’s paintings offer a way into that problem.
At the core of any myth is the very human desire to help stories and warnings survive. Fear, desire, grief, social rules are all difficult ideas to hold, but can be through oral tradition and storytelling distilled into characters, people, places, stories. Myth and folklore allow for complicated internal feelings and exterior structures to be shared and recognised. What Šindlerová is interested in is whether new stories emerge from inherited images in the postmodern age, or are we doomed to always find another way through the same mirror maze?
From left to right: Kiss of Death, Lovers, You wouldn‘t wake up if you wouldn‘t fall asleep I & II Photography by Jialin Yan. Courtesy of the artist and Enzyme Collective.
The titles Kiss of Death (2025) and Lovers (2025), two of the works featured in Don’t Mirror Back’s, place Šindlerová’s paintings in a long visual history of loss and storytelling. The kiss can promise union, as in the story of Adam and Eve, but it can just as easily betray it as in the Gospels, wherein Judas identifies Jesus to his captors with a kiss. Lovers, meanwhile, recur as figures of desire tested by prohibition, separation and loss, from Adam and Eve to Tristan and Isolde. The archetype travels well beyond the European canon: from Orpheus and Eurydice to Layla and Majnun, Radha and Krishna, and Heer and Ranjha, stories of desire repeatedly become ways to speak about separation, devotion and the ways stories can bring people back together.
Šindlerová takes up these themes in a way that suggests the same nebulous, amorphous quality of storytelling that haunts oral retellings and folkloric translation alike also effects the act of painting. What is painting, if not a translation of the ethereal to the mundane? In Kiss of Death (2026), pale forms press together beneath dark, wing-like marks, while Lovers (2026) gathers a figure into a compressed, almost mask-like shape traced and interrupted by red and blue strokes.
Left to right: Mother With Children I, Self-Portrait, Mother With Children III, A Scene I
Šindlerová’s paintings return their bodies to the unsettled (and unsettling) interior world of desire, fear and violence, the same psychological pressure of Bacon’s distorted figures. Freud’s writing on myth offers another lens: stories, he argues, give symbolic form to conflicts that are difficult to approach directly, the basis of all myths is a desire to understand, to communicate. Šindlerová has described folklore as a form of expression more universal than language, and indeed her abstractions hold the physical manifest of the body between symbol and archetype.
Left to right: Icaruses, Then & Now, A Prayer for Dopamine (2026), triptych, MFA Degree Show, Goldsmiths, University of London; Y ou Wouldn't Wake Up If You Wouldn't Fall Asleep (2025), Positions in Contemporary Art: Europe Across Borders, Europe House, London.
Šindlerová’s view of myth as a space where meaning forms before language begets a particularly iterative, layered approach. She draws on Czech and Slavic folklore, particularly K. J. Erben’s A Bouquet. Her process begins with photographs, which she repeatedly redraws and rearranges in digital collages before reworking them on canvas. Each translation loosens the source, and complicates the idea that myth provides a universal form of communication. Her symbols may travel across borders, but they begin in particular histories, including Czech and Slavic folklore and the cultural memory of the Soviet era.
Šindlerová’s non-objective figures may use the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, but take on the emotional mantle of the Supremacists, presented by Eastern European modernist artists in the early twentieth century as a route to spiritual or inner truth, a visual language able to reach beyond naturalistic representation. By arguing that colour and form could express an inner or spiritual reality beyond naturalistic representation, the abstractionists believed that language becomes only capable of reaching something universal by leaving the recognisable behind.
As art historian Myroslava M. Mudrak describes it, Suprematism introduced “a spiritual system with a universal cosmic dimension”.Suprematism and myth both treat non-literal forms as systems of meaning: geometric forms and archetypal figures can communicate spiritual, psychological and social ideas without naturalistic representation. Šindlerová’s paintings use this principle, making bodily relations legible through abstraction even when individual figures remain unidentified.
Suprematism, as Šindlerová’s art does, imagines that a small vocabulary of forms could give shape to a boundless spiritual order. Mythmaking, too, forces that are difficult to face or even grasp (desire, fear, social disorder) into figures and stories that can be shared, passed down.
The question is whether this return to inherited images can make new myths in the age of the internet. We are certainly seeing a return to premodernism in our embrace of the medieval, from chainmail chic to lime-bike jousting, but does this reach back towards the past also suggest a yearning not only for the ritual and community making of a pre-industrial, but for its mythmaking? Lyotard famously defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: a suspicion of the grand stories that claim to explain history or speak for everyone. If those universal stories no longer persuade, can new myths still be made? In a postmodern age suspicious of such grand claims, Šindlerová’s paintings suggest they might still emerge, but only through fragments of old ones.
Cover photography courtesy of Johana Kasalicka.
