03.04. - 15.06.2008




Jitka Chrištofová has the gift of being able to see through the outer layers of what we call ‘the everyday’ world. Her introvert and sensitive character enables her to reveal – both within herself and the phenomena around her – the ‘hidden life’ of unexpected, perhaps almost surreal contexts. Her creative vision is like the mirroring of known reality that is, however, stripped to a bare structure of mental perception and awareness of the energy that forms an integral part of all animate beings and inanimate objects. It is the energy that drives organic and inorganic processes, fusing them into an integral whole. At this level, far behind the façade of ordinary appearances, Jitka Chrištofová explores questions of mutual permeation and interchangeable mental and physical states.

Although emotion and intuition play an essential role in Jitka Chrištofová’s work, her artistic searching has its basis in the effort to re-evaluate reality, to ‘deform and re-encode’ it as she herself says. She often reduces the structures of outward reality to configurations of loosely regular forms whose delicate dynamism indicates the microsphere and macrosphere of existence with its continual changes leading from birth to death. The imaginary prism of her perception is adjusted in such a way that the disintegration of seen objects also means their subsequent reassembling as felt or sensed objects with an emphasis on structure and space – not literal space, but mental space. Although her work is personal and self-contained in character, she enables the viewer to enter her images through an intimate kind of ambivalence. She doesn’t have a declared programme; on the contrary she is willing to enter a dialogue at mutual points of connection between herself and the viewer.

Jitka Chrištofová’s interest in the re-embodying of one form of reality into another ultimately took concrete shape in a series of prints drawing on motifs from nature. Although the dynamism and order of nature are important here, the actual portrayed section or detail of the landscape is not fundamental; the key element is how the image of nature is psycho-plastically transcribed and applied to paper using the metal printing plate. The original inspiration of this series is the original concept of the ‘symbiomorph’, a tangible embodiment of the process through which a new reality is created. Jitka Chrištofová’s efforts resulted in a set of monochrome prints with views of nature – or rather views into nature, inside its movement and processes. In these works, perspective gradually melts away; what is in the foreground or background is of little consequence. Instead, the central focus of each work is how the fabric of concrete reality is dissolved and reconstructed as a metamorphosed parallel to it. The shapes of trees, for example, are recreated in such a way it is clear we are not seeing them in daylight, but as something perhaps seen behind our closed eyelids. It is a view that is sensitive to all-pervading and all-combining energy. Here, the vegetative form expands with the same explosive force as a supernova.

Richard Drury


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The Regional Art Gallery in Liberec
U Tiskárny 1
460 01 Liberec 5
E-mail: oblgal@ogl.cz
Web: www.ogl.cz
Phone: 485 106 325
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