03 Dec 2011

Jitka Mikulicova: 'The Boy, The Fox, The Box' at Galerie Laboratorio, Prague

Galerie Laboratorio presents 'The Boy, The Fox, The Box' by Jitka Mikulicová (1980).

The individual paintings, as the words in the title of the exhibition, appear to be disparate but together they create unexpected associations. Her way of painting, derived from the collage technique, is thus projecting into the content of Jitka Mikulicová's work. The anonymous models – from photographs randomly found in family archives and flea markets – undergo a fascinating transformation in her treatment. On her paintings, Jitka converts people appearing neutral and informal into gloomy beings who force the audience to look away.

Jitka Mikulicová fully focuses on the portrayed model. She extracts the characters from their context, and places them into an unclear and blurred setting. She emphasizes them by means of centered composition derived from techniques common to both advertising and religious propaganda. The eyes are the culmination point of every painting. The subconscious, which is what Jitka Mikulicová is actually depicting, penetrates through them out. The restlessness is materialized into the form of a solid woman with the eyes of a hypnotist /The Box/, a grimace of the devil with children resting in his eyeholes /The Devil/, a mysterious figure with the entire Universe starting to grow inside his hood /The Astronomer/, or a face transformed into an unspecified animal monster by the painter's expressive gesture /The Fox/.

Jitka Mikulicová marries highly intimate iconography to an adequate form. The methods often used in art therapy correspond with the ambition of psychoanalyzing the portrayed characters. She draws her inspiration from collage method, children's expression and the recklessness and coarseness of Art Brut. She melds techniques that display naivety, randomness and freedom, into a sophisticated and masterful style of her own.

The collage, which she pursues in the composition of her paintings so relentlessly, Jitka shows also in its genuine form. This authentic combination of gestic painting and photography forms an apposite pendent of Jitka Mikulicová's cultivated painting style.