Linda Viková: I Will Give You Everything

By Viera Kleinová

If you are interested in contemporary ceramics in Slovakia, you will encounter it only rarely in a gallery context. A restrained shift toward the increased visibility of the ceramic medium has, however, been indicated by several exhibition activities that have taken place in both private and institutional spaces in recent years.

A number of heterogeneous authorial modules have thus entered the public sphere, articulating the transcendence, conceptual nature, and hybridity of ceramic materiality. They are not afraid to communicate interdisciplinarily, to speak with passionate personal and communal engagement, and to discuss ceramic thinking and making in their own voice. One such project was Linda Viková’s exhibition at Staromestská Galéria Zichy in Bratislava, which brings together a selection of works from the past five years, created between 2020 and 2025.

Linda Viková (b. 1977) is an established figure on the Slovak ceramic scene. Her work is grounded in direct contact with the materiality of ceramics and porcelain, moving along a flexible trajectory between design, sculpture, drawing, and painting. With the exhibition I Will Give You Everything, she declares her relationship to ceramics as unconditional; yet it does not succumb to the tyranny of technology, avoids the traps of hermetic sentimentalism, and reforms its current position through concentrated material and ecological research.

Viková has long approached ceramics through the concept of vessels, continuously sending them into motion within living habitats and encouraging active coexistence with them. Her vases, bowls, and objects accumulate the energy of natural and ceramic processes; they function as (auto-)transformative references to an intuitive as well as guided dialogue between the artist and the work. The vessel, as the centre of her interest, condenses several urgent as well as slowly smouldering questions of contemporary ceramic discourse: What does ceramics mean to us today? Is it still the centre of our lives, as understood by Livingstone and Petrie in The Ceramics Reader?¹ Or do we read the vessel more intensely through transmuted, digitally filtered visual exhibitions feeding a pampered Instagram audience, as suggested by contemporary ceramic criticism through the term Hyper Pot?² Is it the symbolic form of the holistic human being—body and soul—a female–male archetype of creativity and life, as perceived by visual artist and ceramicist Mária Bartuszová?³

Linda Viková’s identity is rooted in ceramics. Within the rules of her practice we find not only the imperative of craftsmanship, but also the historical permeability and sophistication of the medium. This has been present since her student years—at that time in the form of individualistic “cupcake” objects in her diploma project, which, with disarming distance, hedonistically and feministically referenced strong, inspiring women. Her work has since taken a different trajectory, yet the echo of female energy remains clearly perceptible. In the current exhibition it glimmers in ephemera referencing Eugénia Lugsová, a forgotten Slovak porcelain artist (whose lustre legacy Viková engages with in the work Pierrot), or culminates in a collection of vessels sharing communal clay work with women from the African Kassena tribe. Lightly and with grace, form and narrative seep into ancient mythology (Hemera, Aether), while at other times Viková embarks on a mature and moving journey into the stories of commedia dell’arte. She ambitiously tests the parameters of the ceramic medium through interdisciplinary collaborations (the object Meet Me Halfway, created with painter Patrícia Koyšová).

What endures, however, is devotion to clay. With extreme sensitivity, Viková perceives the intelligibility, universality, and associative power of earthen materiality. As a committed heir to the Arts and Crafts movement, she believes in the ethos of handwork and understands the effort and purpose of the “exercise of heart and will” advocated by John Ruskin.⁴ An experience whose imprint has never faded was her time in the workshop of ceramicist Young-Jae Lee in Essen. It was perhaps there that she acquired her ceramic idiom: work as a ritualised introverted performance, a physical and deeply intimate relationship with clay, organised in an almost obsessively focused and deliberate rhythm. Viková knows how to run a long-distance race.

She understands that in our self-destructive condition we need to seek practices of genuine change. Her ceramic manifesto targets the intersection of maximal ecological responsibility. She states: “Since I make my living by creating something, by leaving something behind, I feel a great responsibility toward the environment. We surround ourselves with an unnecessary amount of objects that we own and burden the planet with. If I too undeniably contribute to this process, let it be with something that is practically usable. Perhaps then I do not leave an entirely pointless trace. That is why my authorial production is more modest. Fewer things, but done properly.”⁵

Her (not only) glaze experiments are conducted with respect for the modernist tradition, while at the same time directly confronting it with a mirror of ethical and ecological responsibility. Does the ceramic discipline today still require the toxicity of metal oxides, or does it make sense to think in terms of recycling and to experiment with waste materials, such as ash?

“Clay has an inner instinct for form,” once noted American sculptor Stephen De Staebler, adding that he spent much time thinking in the material, with the cardinal question being: What does the clay want to do?⁶ Viková’s clay investigation communicates this perhaps immanent property of matter in works such as Copper Age, Curious Discoveries, and above all in the collection From Ash. What has been present in her work for some time is an extension of sculptural and painterly interventions—the surface no longer functions as a canvas or relief structure, but becomes a three-dimensional contact zone. It is both a guided process and a tribute to chance. Small and almost monumental vessels function as “signals of a mental process”;⁷ they are containers filled with content. There is something living within them—growing, foaming, crystallising, bubbling. They are darkness and light. They were here before us, or they will be here after us.

Artistic research is key to Viková’s practice; it is a goal in itself, not merely a means, and also a valuable visual quality. In collaboration with director Vladimíra Hradecká, the exhibition presents this through the experimental film meditation Afterfire, which reflects on a crisis of perception and opens space for a different view of matter, processes, and our presence within them. In Afterfire, glaze becomes a metaphor for ecosystems balancing between preservation and destruction.

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Linda Viková is a graduate of the Ceramics Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she studied under ceramic sculptor Ivica Vidrová-Langerová. She completed a residency at the Margaretenhöhe studio of Korean-German ceramicist Young-Jae Lee in Essen. She focuses on authorial hand-built ceramics and porcelain, and since 2024 has been developing artistic research into sustainable glazes. She has long been active pedagogically at an elementary art school (ZUŠ) in Bratislava. She is a co-initiator of the Denamit collective, oriented toward supporting and presenting Slovak design and applied arts. Alongside her independent artistic practice, since 2012 she has collaborated with Simona Janišová in the design studio si.li, specialising in everyday ceramics.

Viera Kleinová is Senior curator of the Collections of Architecture, Applied Arts and Design at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava. She also collaborates with the Slovak Design Center and Bratislava Design Week, focusing on applied arts and contemporary design.

Linda Viková: I Will Give You Everything was on view at the Staromestská Galéria Zichy (Oldcity Gallery Zichy) between December 5-31, 2025. Curator: Viera Kleinová. Exhibition design: Andrea Ďurianová. Director and author of the accompanying film: Vladimíra Hradecká.

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Photos by Martin Tomečko

1. Andrew Livingstone – Kevin Petrie (eds.), The Ceramics Reader, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, p. 11.
2. Glenn Adamson, “Rise of the Hyper Pot,” online. Link
3. Gabriela Garlatyová (ed.), Mária Bartuszová, Košice / Rimavská Sobota: Archív Márie Bartuszovej / Mestská galéria Rimavská Sobota, 2021, p. 47.
4. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Prague / Liberec: Malvern / North Bohemian Museum in Liberec, 2023, p. 181.
5. Simona Janišová, “Fewer Things, Done Properly. An Interview with Linda Viková,” Designum, vol. XXV, no. 4, 2019, pp. 22–29.
6. Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, London / New York: Berg Publishers, 2007, p. 50.
7. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970, p. 21.