The work of Veronika Holcová (*1973) represents one of the most distinctive painterly expressions of our time. Her paintings vibrate with an extremely strong visual imagination and intense multilayered content. She projects personal experience, memories, visions, subconscious archetypal contents, nightmares and moments of daydreaming into them. 

All her paintings are in a sense her self-portraits. At the same time, however, they speak to a universal female experience – of the body, vulnerability, strength, desire and fear. The artist herself says that her works function like "flesh-eating flowers" – they attract with their beauty, but beneath the alluring surface they hide tension and unease. Holcová does not succumb to fashion waves, her paintings are timeless in a good sense. She develops her work, which also includes a significant body of works on paper, as an alchemical process in which she allows herself to be guided by elements of automatism, but which she cultivates with her polished professional eye and compositional sensibility. Although her work reflects the influence of surrealism, 19th-century romanticism and art brut, it speaks a contemporary, completely autonomous language. 

This preliminary retrospective includes works from the 1990s to the present. From the 1990s to the present, including her diploma thesis One in the Other (1999), in which she thematized her recent motherhood – drawings by her daughter, Julie Daňhelová, also a graduate of Vladimír Kokola's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, are coincidentally presented by Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb in a parallel exhibition. The exhibition, which is part of a free dramaturgical series of the first retrospectives of artists who entered the scene in the post-1989 period, is accompanied by a monograph by the author and a text by the exhibition curator Terezie Nekvindová.

Curator: Terezie Nekvindová