By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová makes sculpture as though responding to multiple histories at once; the labour of craft, the logic of construction, the archaeology of gesture.
On view at White Cube Bermondsey from 11 February to 29 March 2026, Echo is her most ambitious exhibition to date. But to understand its resonance, you must first understand how her practice was assembled, thread by thread, layer by layer, and often against the grain of traditional material hierarchies.
Hosnedlová’s work sits at the intersection between what is made by hand and what is engineered to endure. While her aesthetic suggests formal textile schooling, she actually studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her shift to embroidery was a deliberate, self-taught departure from the canvas—a search for a slower, more meditative gesture. She treats silk thread like oil paint, layering it with a precision that mimics the rigor of a classical master, yet she resists the ornamental.
When she embeds photorealist silk embroidery into sandstone panels or metal planes, the juxtaposition is calculated. The fragility of fibre forced through mineral surfaces renders labour and material intensity inseparable. In Hosnedlová’s work, a stitched line is not decoration but an argument; a proposition that the human trace can exist within structures built for resilience without being subdued by them.
This tension animates Echo. The installation’s large tapestry forms, partially draped and sheathed in industrial composites, feel like sedimentary deposits of intent. Photorealist embroidered hands appear as intuited maps of human presence—holding a lit match, a pressed palm, a finger tracing an invisible line. These gestures are quiet, almost ordinary, but placed within monumental material contexts, they gain existential weight.
What sets Hosnedlová apart is her embrace of materials that are not static. Mycelium, cultivated and seeded into the cavities of her sculpture, introduces a temporality that architecture typically tries to suppress. Where stone and steel suggest stability, the fungus asserts growth and decay. It is a reminder that nothing is finished; everything is becoming.
Her approach is rigorously disciplined but never literal. She does not narrate; she situates. A stainless steel frame holds embroidered fragments not as relics but as coordinates of action. In a conversation around contemporary art often dominated by surface and spectacle, Hosnedlová insists on durational thought. She asks us to slow down and measure materiality in breaths and threads rather than instant impressions.
For those interested in the evolving relationship between craft, architecture, and biology, Hosnedlová offers a rare perspective. Her sculptures are not merely objects. They are sites where human touch and material endurance negotiate territory together.
Location
Bermondsey, London, 144–152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ
