As I stood on Shoreditch High Street, spying through narrow pipe jutting from a window, I felt like a peeping Tom. But really, although I was peeking in at a naked lady, she was part of a collage by Düsseldorf-based Slovakian artist Stanislava Kovalčíková for her recent exhibition “ret rie vers” at Emalin’s second exhibition space, the Clerk’s House. The piece also included giant snail shells, a sunrise, a vulva badge, and two images of the late Queen Elizabeth II, one on a postage stamp, the other clipped from a British banknote. It was like a hornier version of a Joseph Cornell box, but with the vibe of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946–66).
Inside, Kovalčíková’s exhibition filled every nook and cranny of the Clerk’s House. The artist had turned the space into something like a Prussian fun house: mirrored rooms, mannequins, and huge antique clockfaces—stripped of their hands, these had now been repurposed as surfaces for paintings. Wolkenkratzer (Skyscraper), 2024, shows, among other things, a woman hanging by her bound wrists, an image familiar from so many horror films. A huge clump of gray wool (real, not painted) pours out of the victim’s mouth, as if she were spewing up an old lady’s wig. Other characters in the composition seem casually complicit in her suffering: A finger points, either in judgment or in perverse delight, while another girl stares down in casual contempt, arms crossed, cigarette dangling from her lips. This and other clock paintings on view felt like illustrations for stories not yet written, although Kovalčíková has said that “faces and bodies are more substantial than the storyline of the painting.”
Meanwhile, the house itself had been carpeted with a rigid patchwork of orange, black, and mustard hues familiar to any weary passenger of the London Underground. The District Line moquette was designed in the 1970s by Jacqueline Groag, a Czech Jewish textile designer. Here, this pattern seemed retro yet chic: a tasteful interior choice, symbolic of a time when one could imagine a cleaner, faster future. Yet when you find yourself stuck in one of the city’s more dated subway trains, your seat stained with grime and spilled takeout, this fabric stands for drudgery, bad food, and journeys delayed by signal failure—a perfect example of the mix of “Modernism and contemporary decay” mentioned in the press release.
The final clock painting, Clerk‘s Medusa, 2024,was up in the attic, propped against the wall on a mirrored floor. The piece depicted only half of the Gorgon’s face, but the other half was supplied by the reflection in the floor—reminding us of the mirror Perseus used in order to kill her without looking directly at her. Historically, this room would have been the servants’ quarters, and I loved that the space was off-limits to visitors: I had to crane my neck around the door to get a glimpse, making sure I didn’t tumble down the narrow staircase behind me. Throughout history, the image of the Medusa has been used as an apotropaic, displayed on door knockers, shields, and crockery to ward off evil. Kovalčíková flipped this tradition, squirreling the old Gorgon up in the attic and almost out of sight. Sigmund Freud thought the Medusa myth was all about the fear of castration—of course he did. Another sculpture downstairs, Follow the Boys (Shoe), 2023, contained similar Freudian themes. A stiletto-clad foot juts out from the wall, the shoe’s heel consisting of a severed penis shaft and grisly pair of golden testicles: part feminist trophy, part disaster at the s/m club. The exhibition text mentioned “our nervous attachment to time”; clocks and cocks may be equally unserviceable. It seemed that, in this show, time is most neurotic when it stops moving forward.
