Krisztina Czika

Netherlands

Hungarian-born Amsterdam-based artist, Krisztina Czika, has always felt 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 of. 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.