Markéta Bábková's works impress with their pastel monochrome processing and the style of delicate layered painting. She translates selected personal motifs into contemporary painting with a distinctive private stylisation. Most often he captures his immediate surroundings - still lifes, interiors or their details. This familiar and emotionally powerful environment allows him to capture atmosphere, relationships and subtle details. Through close people, places and everyday situations, he portrays his own experiences, searches for his identity and tries to understand himself and the world around him. Through color and composition, she emphasizes the human presence through the inhabitation of spaces and the multi-layered meanings of discarded objects.

For her, the creation of a work is not just a capture of reality, but an open creative activity of exploring meanings, emotions and relationships between form and space. Also typical is the delicate work with layering of painting and structure, which gives the painting a sense of depth and temporality. For her, painting becomes a process of discovering shapes and interrelationships.

The exhibition Behind the Door present large format multi-coloured woodblock prints and print matrices. The woodblock prints are characterized by strong contrast, simplicity of shapes and strong expression. That is why this ancient graphic technique is still alive and in use today. Graphics, still seen today as a quick means of multiplicative expression, acquire an unmistakable uniqueness through the gradual cutting away of individual colour areas and hand printing. Printmaking is an art of touch - a place where pressure, imprinting and mirroring are not mere technical steps, but traces of meaning that are inscribed in the material. The prints and matrices presented, processed with Bábková's painterly approach, create a shimmering, ephemeral atmosphere of places that is achieved through the gradual rubbing off of matrices and the blending of individual colours.

The central motifs of the exhibition are windows and doors. The silent boundaries between inside and outside. Places where light hesitates, shadows linger and the gaze stops at the threshold. The exhibition is a set of passageways that lead nowhere but to memories, to expectations, to the space between what is seen and what remains hidden.

The doors, whose visuality refers to the typical doors that appeared in many children's rooms, are not just a passageway between rooms, but a border between worlds. Their glass centre became a canvas for the silent play of shadows. Through the glass, reality dissolves, turning into a hint. They preserve the childlike experience of waiting, watching and imagination that is born precisely where seeing is incomplete.

The window is a place of looking and holding. It frames the world without entering it, separating the personal from the public. The motif of looking out of a window is not just a still life, but a silent gesture of observation. Through the glass of the window, we can not only observe the exterior, but the reflection itself brings us back into the room.

Markéta Bábková (*1993) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2013-2019, studio Painting III, Michael Rittstein School, Josef Bolf School). In 2017 she studied at Universitatea se Arte in Bucharest (painting studio, Petru Lucaci School). In 2019, she received the main prize of the Graphics of the Year 2018 in two categories (student work, special prize for graphic technique). In 2021, she received the Audience's Sympathy Award in the Critics' Prize for Young Painting with Overlaps.

curator: Anna Horák Zemanová