Katarina Brunclíková
Katarina Brunclíková is among the most striking and talented graduates of the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian Institute in Opava, evidenced not only by the Red Diploma that she acquired upon completing her magistrate studies with a convincing cycle of modern imaginative images, Prague, and her excellent theoretical work about female photographers who devote their work to women's issues, but more particularly by the actual quality of her work, some of which is presented at her exhibition.
It is apparent from Katarina Brunclíková's first more mature works that the author is particularly interested in artistic photography. She is often attracted by minimalist motifs, sometimes reduced to just light and shadows. She is also attracted by the possibilities of stylizing reality in front of the objective and thus all the more inventively works with the psychological aspects of the impact of color. At the same time, however, it is obvious that she is not just striving for beautiful images, but is also trying to use the actual emotions of the effective compositions, visual metaphors and symbols and shape analogies and contrasts, in order to reflexively express her own experiences, sensations and moods. For example, the cycle Eyes for Buňuel, showing fragments of color-styled reflections of women's faces in mirrors, is a visual representation of her reaction to her grandfather's death. As the author herself says, „they reflect fear, loneliness, but also a longing for reconciliation.“ Similarly, the Music series graphically expresses her perception of music through expressive abstraction and striking – not only as a liste-ner, but also as an active musician. In addition, several cycles of nude figures, where in recent years experiments with projections, body confrontations and various structures or color shifts prevail over classical concepts, are more about the author's feelings and sensations than they are about the beauty of the human body.
Katarina Brunclíková's most mature work so far is undoubtedly her compact cycle of subjective documents from the metropolitan environment of Prague. These images are highly stylized, first through their general blurriness, and through the use of „cross“ technology, which radically changes the real colors registered by the objective. This cycle took a long time to create, during a difficult phase in the young photographer's life. The result is a contextually profound and formally refined work, which shows impressively not only the dominating motifs of a lonely person in the middle of a modern city, but also reflects the author's inner world through various image metaphors. People are somewhat lost in these photographs with dominant green and brown tones; sometimes only their silhouettes are depicted, sometimes we see only blurred fragments of their figures. The leading role is played by the cold, impersonal setting of marble, glass and steel, in which we see lonely pedestrians and in which, like in Plato's cave, we only suspect the reflec-tions of a different, more real and more beautiful world.
Katarina Brunclíková's photographs are supreme visual representations and any attempt to precisely transfer their multiple meanings into concrete words is doomed to failure. Viewers capable of tuning to the author's wavelength and discovering more and more possibilities of interpretation can find the works deeply appealing. For others, they will remain a formal wordplay.
Prof. PhDr. Vladimír Birgus
