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.
Anna Kyjovská, née Štefanovičová (b. 1996), was born in Skalica, Slovakia, and currently lives and works in Prague, where she studied painting under Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts. In her art, she focuses mainly on painting, working with larger as well as smaller formats. At the same time, drawings, ceramics and papier-mâché form an integral part of her work as well. Almost all her paintings are preceded by simple sketches, usually drawn according to a model from real life. In the process of transferring this sketch onto canvas, she often changes the image as compared to the initial drawing. On the canvas, Kyjovská fleshes out various details and carefully reconsiders the colour composition, though she still takes an intuitive approach to her work with colour. Many of her paintings are accompanied by various three-dimensional objects for which she draws inspiration from children’s, folk and amateur art.
Anna Kyjovská’s works capture our attention by their use of colour and their playful and abbreviated painting style, which works with basic lines. Kyjovská frequently finds inspiration from ancient cultures, the circus, puppet theatre and children’s toys or souvenirs, incorporating these motifs into contemporary paintings characterized by a distinct stylization bordering on kitsch. She works with symbols and metaphors that reflect personal and collective experience, and she experiments with colour and texture to express the emotions associated with memories. The resulting works contain references to cultural and historical contexts or to historical artifacts, thus illustrating how the past shapes our identity today.
This idea is explored by the Sleepy Heads series (2024) as well. The canvases serve as a sketchbook of imaginary landscapes that can be endlessly flipped through in order to explore the hidden corners of our own memory. The main subject of the series are pillows and the heads resting on them, which do not represent real people. The only thing that is real is the motif on the pillow, which copies the pattern form actual bedding. Even the size of the paintings (50 × 60 cm) mirrors the size of a pillow. The stylized forms of the bedding reflect memories and feelings associated with objects of sentimental value. The painting is covered in a layer of tinted linseed turpentine oil, which produces a colour filter evoking the atmosphere of a lit lamp, darkness or the sunset. In each painting, Kyjovská focuses on one colour, chosen intuitively for the work in question.
The bedding, with its characteristic patterns typical of the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, takes us back to a time that many of us associate with a sense of nostalgia and lightness of being, while the anonymous faces reflect the universal experiences and feelings that connect us. In this way, Kyjovská creates a space for considering the things that shape our identity and for reflecting on how we are formed by memories of the past. Each painting is an invitation to explore our own relationship to the past and its presence in our lives and memories.
