Sanna Kannisto Encounters / Denisa Lehocká

Lombardi—Kargl is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibitions Sanna Kannisto Encounters and Denisa Lehocká Untitled 2025.

Sanna Kannisto
Encounters

Sanna Kannisto’s work is firmly situated within the traditions of scientific illustration, staged photography, and still life. The strength of her work derives from the proximity and sensitivity with which she approaches her subjects; her profound relationship with nature—her manner of perceiving and experiencing it—forms the foundation of her artistic expression.

Collaboration with scientific researchers constitutes a significant element of her practice. In her work, Kannisto highlights ecological questions, such as the dwindling numbers of birds and insects. Rather than presenting beauty for its own sake, she regards it as a compelling force and a persuasive tool—capable of eliciting emotional responses and, consequently, influencing human behavior.

Kannisto’s distinctive visual language was developed during extended research stays in the biodiverse regions across Latin America and Europe. There, she constructed portable “field studios”— isolating animals from their natural habitats by photographing them against a stark white backdrop and creating an artificial setting for close observation. This mutual gaze—artist and bird studying each other—is echoed in the exhibition space, inviting viewers into an intimate encounter with creatures we usually only see from afar.

Denisa Lehocká
Untitled 2025

Denisa Lehocká works across various media, including works on paper, textiles, and sculptural objects. Her practice integrates fragments of everyday life and combines (found) organic and inorganic materials, often fabrics, imbued with traces of memory. Through an intuitive, process-driven approach, she arranges forms into larger modular or serial compositions, exploring notions of infinite combinability in two and three dimensions.

She creates spatial sculptural installations—what she terms “spatial collages”—with careful attention to how they inhabit and respond to the given conditions of space, subtly guiding the viewer’s physical movement through it. Her works appear as levitating bodies, materializations of the the so-called immaterial, and serving as representations of deep subjectivity and the ephemeral.

Her work resonates with a female artistic tradition that highlights the social dimensions of corporeality, carrying a therapeutic, almost healing, bandage-like undertone. At the same time, it exudes a meditative, ritualistic spirituality, rooted in the rhythmic, non-rationalized gesture.

By calling her works Untitled, Lehocká refrains from singling out individual pieces from her continuous flow of production. She positions the viewer as a partner in interpretation, offering neither titles nor instructions but rather an open space for imagination and personal engagement.