Hana Puchová

Hana Puchová is part of the generation of artists from the mid-1980s who were inspired by the work of the German Neue Wilde and artists from the Italian transavantgarde. Representatives of this new stream of European post-modernism, in reaction to the post-conceptual art of the preceding generation, fully rehabilitated painting. Husband and wife Jana and Jiří Ševčík (A Farewell to Modernism / Loučení s modernismem, Four Reflections on New Painting / Čtyři úvahy o nové malbě) are among the representatives of early reflections of European postmodernist theory (Achille Bonito Oliva, Lóránd Hegyi) in the Czech scene. Artists in Ostrava who began adopting the new trends were concentrated around the group Private Parts (Přirození) established in 1988, whose members also included Jiří Surůvka, Petr Lysáček, Daniel Balabán and Pavel Šmíd.

From 1991 to 1997 Hana Puchová studied in the illustration studio of Jiří Šalamoun at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. She was represented in 1998 at an exhibition of Jana and Jiří Ševčík titled Ostrava – Arrt? (Ostrava – umjeni…?) at Mánes in Prague, which was then also shown at the House of Art (Dům umění) in Ostrava. After graduating from UMPRUM she returned to Ostrava, where she teaches and in addition to painting occasionally works as an illustrator of books (Jan Balabán, Petr Hruška).

            The most characteristic theme in the work of Hana Puchová is personal micro-history. Her work foregrounds individual pieces of everyday life, which are not shared by all the masses whose experience makes up the picture of a certain era, but only by a very narrow close-knit group of people, as in her series Living Room(s) (Obývací pokoje, second half of the 1990s). Her expressive paintings, often in classic forms such as portraiture and still life, possess a strong temporal component, the result of the long process behind their very creation, but also a product of the characteristically cyclical quality that characterises them (We’re Here / Jsme tady, Eyes Wide Open / Oči hluboko dokořán); they are a kind of micro-history of the artist’s family, immediate surroundings and the Ostrava region itself. The series We’re Here contains humanistic portraits of the artist’s close friends, in which she affirms their closeness and also their plain existence. The paintings in this cycle include the canvases Jirka and Daniela (2010), a portrait of the Ostrava artist Jiří Surůvka, The Hruška Brothers (Bratři Hruškovi, 2010), depicting the Ostrava poet Petr Hruška and the literary critic Pavel Hruška, and Jan and Daniel (2010), presenting the siblings writer Jan and painter Daniel Balabán.  

Jsme tady (kat. výst.), Galerie Beseda 2011. OVA 95-05 (kat. výst.), Galerie výtvarného umění v Ostravě 2006. Ostravská úderka (kat. výst.), Galerie města plzně 2003. 8 z Ostravy (kat. výst.), Galerie Caesar 2001. Ostrava-umjeni…? (kat. výst.), Mánes 1998.