Lea Fekete – Continua

The exhibition Continua, currently on view at Nedbalka Gallery, brings together the work of Lea Fekete, an artist whose career has unfolded at the intersection of fashion design, textile art and the broader field of visual culture. Her practice encompasses fashion, textile works, and costume design for theatre and film. Even her jewellery reflects the sensibility of a clothing designer: rather than functioning as isolated adornments, these pieces form part of a larger dialogue with the body and the garment. What links the many facets of her oeuvre is a distinctive and persistent engagement with the possibilities of material itself.

Most recently, Fekete has expanded her material repertoire to include glass. The results of this work – a series of glass vases — are being shown for the first time in this exhibition at the Nedbalka Gallery. Working with glass has opened up new possibilities for experimentation, while at the same time requiring an engagement with the medium’s technological processes and inherent constraints. In 2025 Fekete began collaborating with the Czech glassworks Vašek Jaroš in Sychrov, consciously entering a technological environment previously unfamiliar to her. She does not approach glass with the ambition to master it immediately, but with respect for its properties and with a desire to explore its possibilities. She chooses glass not because it stands in opposition to textile, but because – paradoxically – it shares qualities that recall her textile experience. The experience she has gained through working with textile and metal carries over intuitively into glass. Her interest in structure, layering, the trace of intervention, fragment and material transformation remains present, though it takes on a new form. The shift from one medium to another is therefore not a rupture of the previous creative line, but its continuation and transformation.

The selection of works for the exhibition reflects this intention. Alongside a group of monumental glass vases created in 2026, the exhibition presents earlier textile works, jewellery and garment designs. The relationships between these works reveal both the continuity of the artist’s creative thinking and the ways in which it evolves in response to different materials. In Fekete’s practice, material is not merely a vehicle for executing a preconceived idea; it plays an active role in the making of the work, helping to shape its final form and meaning.