Kateřina Štenclová

Kateřina Štenclová is one of few Czech artists systematically and almost exclusively focusing on abstract painting. Her main means of expression are pure colours, the relationships of geometric and organic areas, the painting gesture and shape of the paint pads. She also marginally touched on matters concerning monochrome painting or the relationship between painting and architecture. Štenclová is part of the generation of artists of whom the group Tvrdohlaví made the biggest name for themselves. She exhibited with some of them at semi-official exhibitions (The Past and Future at the Vinohradská tržnice pavillion). Not only does she differ in gender from the all-male Tvrdohlaví group, but her work is, above all, different in that it is not the Czech variety of postmodernism. Her work can be classified as modernist painting of the second half of the twentieth century, and she continues to develop her ideas. Following her expressive beginnings from the end of the 1980s in which she sought a way to transfer her emotions to the canvas using abstract splashes of colour, her paintings became more composed. The painting gesture lost its drawing character and, from the early 1990s, she worked predominantly with large colour areas of pure colours, which she sometimes creates from powdered pigments. The ensuing coloured area is of a unique “dry” and at the same time gently glazed character. Her paintings from the 1990s do not work with spatial illusion; the objectivity of the hanging picture is emphasised in them. Her pictures also do not have a symbolic agenda or narrative content, which from the beginning hindered their comprehension and acceptance by the Czech art community and criticism. Štenclová's breakthrough was in 1994 with her exhibition at the Nová síň gallery. She presented here a series of canvases, each of which had only two or three parallel streaks of paint. The pictures were installed in irregular order and together formed a single painting installation that reacted to and utilised the architecture of the exhibition space. Her experimentation with the composition of several paintings into a single pictorial whole reached its pinnacle in the series The Edge of the Event I and II (1998-1999) that gained considerable response in the international press (Artforum, Art in America). At the dawn of the new millennium Štenclová abandoned austere geometry and began to work with the relationship of the circular painting gesture and right angle format of the paint pad, and also with the relationship of various layers of painting to each other. Since 2005 she has used a broader and more flexible brush that emphasised in her new work the calligraphy character of the traces of paint. This technique led to the creation of a series of canvases with random splashes of colour on polythene and which also cover the floor in her studio.