Hana Puchová: Bytosti na stole

The exhibition Beings on the Table represents the first solo presentation of the Czech painter and draftsman Hana Puchová in Slovakia. White & Weiss Gallery will present a selection from her current painting cycle, the core of which are floral still lifes balancing between the intimacy of the everyday and the solemnity of the moment. A significant part of the exhibited works was created directly on the occasion of this exhibition.

Stylized flowers in vases offer the author a wide emotional and meaningful spectrum, in which she can move freely between simplicity and opulence, everyday life and celebration. However, the objects in their immediate surroundings anchor these scenes in the civil space-time of everyday life, into which cut flowers enter as extraordinary sensory events. The experience of beauty, which is associated with our habit of decorating our homes with flowers, always changes in relation to the type, quantity and arrangement of the chosen plants. A kind of added value is the painter's play with surface and volume, thanks to which stems, leaves and inflorescences appear more robust and corporeal - like fleshy beings and living partners of the painter's personal life.

The increasing attention paid to the work of Hana Puchová reflects a wider transformation of value criteria in (not only) Czech fine art. The personal perspective of her work is highly valued, which, especially in the drawing, takes on an almost diary-like character. The author's approach to everyday life does not contain an ironic degradation to banality. On the contrary, in her paintings and drawings, everyday scenes are part of a lived reality, which has its serious and humorous sides, a personal dimension and a non-violently attached social overhang. In addition to all this, Puchová converses with the tradition of European painting, with its historical and modern genres, and at the same time connects painting as a form of high art with its long-recognized sibling – illustration.

Hana Puchová's personal and professional career has been connected with the art scene of her native Ostrava since the second half of the 1980s. She received her formal art education at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. After returning to Ostrava, she taught at an elementary school for Roma children for many years, while at the same time she devoted herself to liberal arts. Since last year, he has been leading the Painting 1 studio at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava.