Denisa Krausová

Denisa Krausová (1981) is a distinctive voice of contemporary Czech painting. During her time at Brno’s Faculty of Fine Arts, she studied with several important figures of the 1980s and 1990s generation: graphics with Margita Titlová-Ylovsky, environment with Vladimír Merta, sculpture with Michal Gabriel, and a final painting phase with Martin Mainer. She expanded her studies by going on exchanges to Italy and Romania that presaged the distance she has kept from domestic art ever since. Krausová lives and works in the Moravian town of Mikulov, i.e., outside the country’s main center of art, but this in no way limits her distinctive visual style or prevents her from maintaining contact with the contemporary scene. Despite her study of so many different disciplines, she has focused on painting in the long term. Her artistic vocabulary has changed over time, but she has remained close to a sketch-like, at times graphic expression that is underscored by her use of templates to create sculptural relief-like compositions. In recent years, she has focused on themes from the world of nature, including paintings of animals and wild plants, or still-lifes reminiscent of Dutch Baroque painting. The still-life format is present in her most recent work as well, consisting of images of her children. Krausová works with the “mental collage” technique in which she combines scenes from her life into one complex jumble on the canvas. Distinctly repeating motifs in her work include hands, roses, and skulls. Though she occasionally produces fantastical scenes resembling Surrealist visions, her art remains profoundly contemporary and unmistakably hers. Denisa Krausová has received nominations for the Critics’ Award for Young Painters and the National Gallery Prague’s NG 333 Award. Her work has been shown at various group and solo exhibitions, including What Goes Around Doesn’t Come Around at Brno’s Galerie OFF/FORMAT, Burning Potato at the Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava, and The Head Is the Insides of a Hat at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague (2018).