Anežka Abrtová↓

About the work

Kissed by a Stinger

The basic element of Anežka Abrtová’s artistic message is the drawing, which she sometimes combines with sculpture, objects, or performance. She approaches her art as a process in which she seeks to reveal an inner map, for instance through the use of visual imagination and its reflection in the real world – or she creates a record of movement in space inside the body. She does not work on the basis of any sketch or plan, and the final outcome often remains hidden from her, appearing retroactively during the process. In terms of visual form, one could say that she approaches it as a “collage” by combining various forms of visual representation like constantly changing identities and the expression thereof.

The central motif in Abrtová’s art is the human body in its physicality and intimacy – sometimes complemented by the use of symbols or depicted as just the individual parts of a person. She occasionally works with stories from her surroundings, adding collective meanings from fairy tales, myths, and other tales. Recently, she has tended to erase such content, and so the entire process has become a kind of long-term layering of the „image“ and its subsequent uncovering. Her graduation work Kissed by a Stinger loosely follows on her earlier work. The bee’s stinger is an inconspicuous motif in her drawings, one that accompanies the process by which various works were created.