Veronika Holcová, Self-portrait Unconcluded

The work of Veronika Holcová (*1973) represents one of the most distinctive artistic expressions in contemporary painting. Her paintings resonate with an exceptionally powerful visual imagination and an intense, multi-layered depth of meaning. She projects into them personal experiences, memories, visions, subconscious archetypal elements, nightmares, and moments of daydreaming. In a sense, all her paintings are self-portraits. At the same time, however, they speak to the universal female experience—of the body, vulnerability, strength, desire, and fear. The artist herself says that her works function like “carnivorous flowers”—they attract with their beauty, but beneath their alluring surface lie tension and unease. Holcová does not succumb to passing trends; her paintings are, in the best sense of the word, timeless. 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, which she nevertheless refines 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, entirely autonomous language. This preliminary retrospective includes works from the 1990s to the present, including her graduation project One Within the Other (1999), in which she explored her new motherhood—drawings of her daughter, Julie Daňhelová, also a graduate of Vladimír Kokolia’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, whom, coincidentally, the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb is presenting in a parallel exhibition. Accompanying the exhibition, which is part of a loose thematic series of first retrospectives of artists who emerged on the scene after 1989, is a monograph featuring a text by the exhibition’s curator, Terezie Nekvindová. Veronika Holcová, Self-portrait Unconcluded -