Katarina Brunclíková

Katarina Brunclíková has many photographic cycles to her name, in which she displays an extraordinary talent for composition and for expressing the relationship between forms and colour tones. Her work follows a natural developmental trajectory and she continues to explore new themes. She draws on natural processes that, depending on certain laws, transform, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes significantly. Her work stimulates our imagination and appeals to everyone differently depending on their experience and knowledge. Austere yet sensitive images conceal special secrets and possess different levels of meaning that overlap, interpenetrate and interweave.

Over the last two years, Brunclíková has created a remarkable, romantic, or perhaps nostalgic, collection of photographs inspired by flowers. She likes to experiment with light, which she adjusts and transforms in different ways. She finds her motifs in the garden, which she herself planned, created and tends. She works with artificial light sources to create an unusual, highly impressive atmosphere.

She uses long-exposure to create magical still lifes in which shapes emerge from the darkness that fascinate her. Sometimes she changes the lighting during the exposure in order to achieve the desired effect, with the flowers appearing to grow from the depths of an indefinite place. They enchant her the most at the moment they fade. She is intrigued by how each “dies” in a different way.

Sometimes she had to wait for days or weeks for the plants to wither and dry, in order to achieve the form she sought. She sought to portray accurately the structures arising in nature. She does not retouch the photos, but respects the passing of time. She regards the flowers sold in shops as being too perfect, and so she looks for her motifs in gardens, where they develop, mature and eventually, like everything in the universe, die. It is in the last stage of life that the flowers possess a special poetry that expresses their perishing beauty, a beauty that paradoxically can be at its most gorgeous and dazzling precisely at the moment it is being extinguished.

Her new collection is reminiscent of a Baroque still life, in which artists dealt with colour shades and sophisticated lighting with extraordinary sensitivity and subtlety. They managed to achieve such incredible effects, even though they were deviating from a reality that, paradoxically, they thus emphasised all the more. Katarina Brunclíková’s latest collection follows on naturally from her previous work, while acquiring a new dimension primarily through a different approach to the resolution of light relationships.

Jiří Machalický