Lucie Rosická
Lucie Rosická’s Laundromat approaches the space of the self-service laundromat as a contemporary allegory for the artist’s personal journey toward motherhood—a reality far removed from its idealised image. The laundromat becomes a liminal space in which care is mechanised, time is strictly organised, and repetition replaces personal expression. It thus becomes the stage for Rosická’s unflinchingly candid presentation of her own experience and of the vulnerable, shifting, and deeply contradictory nature of this life journey.
Although self-portraiture remains a key motif, it undergoes a fundamental transformation in this presentation. The figure no longer hides; the artist’s face is now clearly recognisable—direct and unwavering. This transformation is reflected in the line itself, which disintegrates, breaks irregularly, and loses continuity. Thread ceases to function as a bearer of certainty and control and instead becomes a record of an inner state—fragmented and overburdened. This repetitiveness—present both in the motifs and in the process itself—points to the endless labour of care and everyday life, embodied here by the space of the laundromat.
Drawing inspiration from works such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969), which declared that “Maintenance is a job; maintenance is a way of life”, and Mary Kelly’s seminal project Post-Partum Document (1973–1979), which transformed domestic labour into documented production through a rigorous, almost scientific method of archiving, Rosická seeks to continue this dialogue.
By foregrounding the industrialised spaces of everyday life, the exhibition rejects sentimentalised narratives of care. Motherhood is not positioned here as a role but as a condition. What emerges is a portrait of labour that is necessary yet overlooked; publicly visible, privately borne, and endlessly repeated.
This exhibition is not only about motherhood; it is also about coming of age, about transformation and shifts within life more broadly. Washing becomes an image of cyclicality, repetition, and the continual transformation of both personality and body—of inner self and physical shell. From used to wet, from wet to dry; ironed, adjusted, and once again. It also evokes a kind of “second adulthood,” not the completion of puberty but the closing of a broader cycle and the entrance into a new one.
The exhibition introduces new concepts: deliberate errors—glitches—that multiply, deform, and partially obscure the “selfies” typical of the artist’s work. They begin as a digital translation of drawing, later stitched into fabric. At the same time, the artist demonstrates both technical precision and a new approach to her practice. For Rosická, the glitch becomes a symbol of exhaustion and the loss of the body’s unity—the vibration of a fragmented self who is simultaneously mother, artist, wife, lover, and daughter. Importantly, the glitch cannot be identified up close: it appears as a confusion of lines, as an error. Only from a distance, with perspective, are we able to read the whole and understand the situation—much as in life.
Another new element in Rosická’s work is a series of three-dimensional objects—sculptures within an installation that evoke the peeled skin of the human body. They appear simultaneously as unusual garments and as partial human forms: a kind of husk, remainder, or imprint. They evoke what we are, what remains of us, and what we believe constitutes our identity. Yet this is only an inconsequential mask—a skin that can be shed. Just as we must sometimes discard our preferred “versions” of ourselves and transform into something new.