Hamburger Bahnhof's central hall has the same cathedral lung as Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. It eats most things you put in it. Last summer Klara Hosnedlova chose to build embrace there, the inaugural CHANEL Commission. Tapestries nine metres tall. Cast-glass reliefs the colour of bone. Embroidered passages stretched between iron and stone. The whole thing read like a subterranean time capsule that had quietly come to the surface.
Hosnedlova was born in 1990 in Uherske Hradiste, Czechoslovakia, and lives in Berlin. Her route into sculpture went through embroidery first, an old craft she has carried into installation work that often feels closer to film set than gallery. She likes to choreograph the space around the viewer. You walk inside her work, not past it.
The materials list is part of the seduction: cast glass, sandstone, concrete, iron, textile, and embroidery so dense it reads as paint from a distance. growth, her 2024 show at Kunsthalle Basel, was the dry run. embrace was the moment the practice stepped into a different scale altogether. The embroidered panels at Hamburger Bahnhof draw their motifs from film and video she shot of performers staging quiet interventions across Berlin. Home, utopia, surveillance, the slow violence of ideology, all of it is there, and none of it is announced.
What she gets right is the temperature of the work. There is no shouting. The room holds you, the way a friend's house holds you when you have been away too long. The forms are unfamiliar but the feeling is not. Wallpaper called the installation sublime. I would call it generous.
White Cube took her on in 2024. Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin still represents her. By next year she will be on the road of major institutions, and the prices will follow. For now there is still the chance to encounter the work as work, before it becomes a market story.
Go if you can. If not, watch how she handles a room. Few artists this young can fill 2,500 square metres without flinching.
