"Visiting Mermaids" - Photo 1 - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

Hungarian-born Amsterdam-based artist, Krisztina Czika, has always felt herself irresistibly drawn to the material world, to what you might call the stuff of life. Even as a student in Budapest and later in the Netherlands, she zoomed in instinctively, fascinated by how everything was put together. In her work she began to experiment with many different kinds of physical materials, focused not solely on their palpable characteristics, but equally on the stories and emotions they carried within them; concerned with both the physical and the metaphysical. This material fascination has consistently inspired wholly idiosyncratic research and has influenced both the focus and the form of Krisztina’s subsequent art and conceptual design work. Krisztina is inspired by everyday objects — once again, the stuff of life. These objects may take the form of seemingly mundane pieces of technology, seemingly useless waste products or even just the materials from which either of these things are made. Each project begins with the identification and exploration of a particular object, substance or material. Often, because of the very commonplace nature of its role in our lives, this tends to be something that is generally overlooked, or even looked down upon. An IKEA mug, for example. A fallen head-hair, plucked from a sleeve. A bundle of old negatives in a pile of street-trash. Krisztina’s aesthetic investigation begins at an elementary level, with a profound exploration of the very smallest particles of the chosen materials and an examination of how they develop and evolve, both with and without human intervention. Underpinning much of Krisztina’s work is an interest in the transformation of the everyday into new and diverse forms; the journey from the building blocks of our daily life — familiar and functional — into something abstract and thought-provoking, leading to a fascinating and often highly rewarding reevaluation of the world around us. Appreciation of the multifarious aspects of any given material is a necessary stepping stone in the creation of new uses, new applications and endless artistic possibilities. So having researched and reviewed these materials in what you might call their natural state, the artist intervenes, taking the materials to the next level, endowing them with new forms that still somehow reflect or reference their previous life.