The concept of the historically focused collection exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story will be expanded by a series of exhibitions of the youngest generation of artists, current students or graduates from art school studios. In this way, the curators will revive Tutsch's basic strategy of discovering and presenting the works of previously unknown artists in a new context. Gallery Na bidýlku II will thus become a laboratory for new approaches to the traditional medium of painting and installation, whose transformations Tutsch has followed and supported for several decades.
Tereza Zichová was born in 1992 in Černožice, a village near Hradec Králové, and currently lives and works in Prague (her studio is in the Libeň district). She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), having studied first under Michael Rittstein in his painting studio and then at Jiří Petrbok’s drawing studio.
She is known for her expressive drawing style, which serves as a foun-dation for the paintings she produces in a wide variety of formats. She also explores the artistry of colour lithography. Her creative journey begins with sketches as she works out the ideal motif and composition. She renders some of these in smaller formats before progressing to medium sizes and, ultimately, expanding selected motifs to two metres in scale. Each format has its own colour scheme. The intensity of colours and styles is curated from different periods of art history, and even from sources such as Walt Disney’s animated films. The end results encompass a multitude of archetypal themes, spanning fabled figures, Renaissance and Baroque art, mythical creatures, modern fairytale characters, and icons of the music industry. In the artist’s storytelling, the mythical genie crosses paths on the edge of the forest with Little Red Riding Hood, Medusa carries geese, and Elvis does a dance at dawn. And yet the snippets of pop-culture concepts on these canvases are not intended as a critique of postmodern vacuity, because in Tereza’s work they are not symbols referencing consumer society, but elements of a narrative telling a new story. The artist’s work embodies a delicate interplay between the intimate and the universally recognisable, reflecting a fasci-nation with symbols and palettes, and a penchant for staging that imbues her subject-matter with a theatrical flair.
Distinctive elements of her paintings include fabric patterns, ornaments, and tile designs inspired by domestic settings. She employs a diverse range of drawing strokes, from expressive gestures to intricate motifs. This contrast infuses her pieces with a lightness of touch and ample time to delve into the narrative. She is interested in the expressive qualities of forms – lines, colours, and pictorial patterns – that can convey personal moods and deeper psychological meanings.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.
