Jitka Anlaufová

Jitka Anlaufová (1962) belongs to the generation of graduates from  Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts (Profs. R. Kolář, M. Knížák, and F. Hodonský), that entered the Czech art scene at the beginning of the 1990s – in the complicated “post-revolution” period. She managed to get over this period of uncertainties with respect to basic values and deal with cultural and social changes of her own “living space”. Therefore it should come as no surprise that it was precisely “space” that entered the artist’s painting work as one of the fundamental topics of her entire painting career. She perceives space in painting as an analogical state of the material world, as a regularity or system that we never know everything about, and that always has a mystery hidden inside, resulting in existential anxiety. If at first sight, Jitka Anlaufová’s paintings may seem to be “refined” in a minimalistic way and formally “transparent”, then they have another very important level with individual content that polemizes, through human experiences, with the timeless stability of geometry, which the artist revives and by doing so she removes the seeming timelessness. For Anlaufová, abstract expression becomes a fateful game where she analogically partially reveals some sort of a functioning system and sinks into an area of general cognition. What appears to be harmonic and formally “designed” on the surface is, simultaneously with its content, warningly drawing and perhaps even dangerous because it is destabilizing.

By a repetitive use of motives and their variability, the artist creates a raster of strange, somnambulist, dream reality, an analogy of life pulsating under an experiential object surface. She enters matter with visual mediums (light, drawing and colour). The viewer gets drawn into unknown depths, standing in front of a tunnel leading to the unknown. It is a strong personal testimony through applications of impersonal visualisation, something that is unique and very contributive in contemporary Czech painting.

Vaňous Petr: Jitka Anlaufová - Listy (rubrika Galerie), A2 kulturní týdeník, s. 26-27

Vaňous Petr: Meziprostor, Ateliér, č. 12/2005, s. 4