Hana Garová – Gatekeeper

The 2023 exhibition season at the České Budějovice House of Art concludes with Gatekeeper, an exhibition of works by painter Hana Garová, who presents several previously unexhibited large-format red paintings (“Ravens”) alongside a careful selection of paintings representing other themes and approaches to painting that she worked with at the same time. The exhibition also includes a new series of monotypes and an installation of oil pastel drawings. This seemingly diverse collection is bound together by both external (visual style) and internal (content, meaning) commonalities. Garová’s art is characterized by an expressive visual style, strong gestures, a sense of urgency, and a focus on the figurative core of the image, which nevertheless balances between figuration, deformation, and abstraction.

Hana Garová works energetically, forcefully, tenaciously. The need to create is a feverish process, and the artistic act is a ruthless daily struggle between the artist and her work. With the exception of some paintings that touch on real life, in particular her series of self-portraits, Garová does not work according to reality. In her paintings and drawings, she externalizes her unsettling fantasy world and the dark matter in art that drives it. Her works’ visual stories are difficult to understand. The figures are dematerialized into mixed lifeforms plagued by restlessness. The paintings’ space, too, is not as one would expect: it is essentially a layered substance saturated with the energy of intense physical painterly work. Colors and forms do not appear permanent. Light reveals the richness of structures and the quality of surfaces.

The process of painting itself plays an important role in Garová’s art. Urgent themes and images that want to be realized determine their own path. One painting evokes (inspires) another. The figures are transformed as she works with the paints. Shapes cannot be clearly distinguished from the background. There is a sense of ambiguity to her works. To create is to deal with problems as they come up, to find ways of capturing the reality with which the artist is obsessed. This is a difficult thing to achieve, as difficult as stopping at the right moment or moving on, even at the risk of destruction. Should one stick with a carefully thought-out approach, or work directly and impulsively, follow instinct, work with and follow up on chance, try to give flesh to other possibilities…? How does one choose which part of chance to preserve when one cannot turn back time on a painting? Sometimes a thing disappears and the canvas is completely overloaded, with no way of continuing. The painting covers over the story.

Tireless seeking, intensity, passion, expression, and the desire to express herself with the greatest sense of urgency all cause Hana to paint her images and destroy them at the same time. A new painting is always a source of both joy and pain.

Hana Garová (1986) is a Slovak painter who lives and works in Prague, where she studied painting under Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda at the Academy of Fine Arts (2007–2013). Before this, she was influenced by the teachings of the Slovak intermedia artist Vladimír Kordoš, who noted Hana’s “quick hands” while she was at Bratislava’s ŠÚV secondary school (2002–2006). Kordoš encouraged her to draw a lot, in particular all that moved (she didn’t much enjoy drawing static things). As a result, she for the first time felt more intensely that she had “found the path that she must walk – or even run – along, even if she had no idea where it would lead.” She considers her personal encounter with the paintings of Francis Bacon to be a key moment in her artistic evolution. Bacon’s “raw and uncompromising” depictions of “existence itself, free of embellishments, just as it is,” were an immensely intense experience that left its mark on Hana and influenced her. She has exhibited at established galleries (Trade Fair Palace, Prague; Adam Gallery, Brno; Zahorian van Espen, Prague; Galerie etc., Prague; Photoport, Bratislava; Galerie arto.to, Úhelný Mlýn, Libčice nad Vltavou) as well as at alternative venues (Garage Gallery, Prague-Karlín; Hotdock Project Space, Bratislava; Industra Art, Brno; Galerie Holešovická Šachta, Prague). In 2017, she was a finalist in VUB Malba, a prestigious Slovak competition for young painters. Her work can be found in gallery holdings as well as private collections.