EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

The exhibition consists of two main thematic cycles, which I am currently focusing on.
The first one is a cycle of paintings with environmental issues, which I started painting already at art school, the first five paintings were part of my final bachelor's thesis. Since then more paintings have been painted, one of them is e.g. a recent painting Orangutans, which was painted at my son's request of his favorite animals.
The second cycle is from a sports environment where, as a mother of children playing tennis, I spend a lot of time at trainings and tournaments, and as someone who doesn't do too much sports, I try to capture this environment from my own point of view.

ARTIST BIO

Monika Železná is a Czech painter born and raised in Slovakia. She moved permanently to Prague in 1998. She received a master's degree in Banking and Finance before changing direction to the visual arts.

In 2023, she completed her bachelor's degree at the Art & Design Institute in Prague - painting studio of Roman Franta/Lukáš Miffek and graphic studio of Jiří Lindovský/Martin Velíšek.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Utopia
I started painting these paintings depicting some of the many environmental problems as my final bachelor's thesis in 2022. It is not my goal to solve the problems shown in my work; they would not even be within my competence. If nothing else, it is at least a small reminder of what we are facing as a society, and because not all the consequences are constantly in front of our eyes, we may sometimes forget. The solution is beyond us as individuals. Therefore, they are solved on canvas, at least artistically, in the form of a kind of utopia unattainable in the real world. This also corresponds to the double execution technique, where a more realistic representation of the given problem (e.g. the loss of glaciers), painted with a brush, is contrasted with a more expressive depiction of an "artistic" solution using a spatula (an untouchable glacier).

Off the record
The aim of this cycle of paintings is to capture moments that are not among the first that would arise in the mind when thinking of tennis.

The first impulse for the creation of a painting with this theme was the frequently occurring phenomenon of children looking for a spot of a ball on clay. A higher number of players in doubles tournaments also means a higher number of seekers. Thus, the first tennis painting – Searching for a Landing Spot, was created, which opened up the space for other captured impressions from this environment.