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.
Studies:
1990-92 Studio of landscape and figurative painting - František Hodonský
1989-90 Intermedia Studies, Studio of Milan Knížák
1986-92 Academy of Fine Arts, Prague
1986-89 Studio of Painting - Radomír Kolář
2007 Sympozium KRAJINA ÚSTECKÉHO KRAJE, Smolnice, ČR
2006 Residency at Vila Paula, Galerie Klatovy / Klenová
2005 Mezinárodní umělecké sympozium MÍSTA PAMĚTI, augustiniánský klášter, Šternberk, ČR
1999 Mezinárodní umělecké sympozium, Montpelier, Francie
1998 Mezinárodní umělecké sympozium NA HRANICI, Hrutkov, Jindřichův Hradec, ČR
1997 Mezinárodní umělecké sympozium KÁMEN A ČAS, Langenfeld-Burgstein, Oetzal-Tyrol, Rakousko
1995 Litografické sympozium bez hranic, Schloss Sigharting, Rakousko
1993 Stipendium malíře Čeňka Pražáka, Švýcarsko
1990 Stipendijní pobyt, Akademie výtvarných umění - Pietro Vannuci, Perugia, Italie
1988 Studijní pobyt, Akademie výtvarných umění v Petrohradu, Rusko
Vaňous Petr: Jitka Anlaufová - Listy (rubrika Galerie), A2 kulturní týdeník, s. 26-27
Vaňous Petr: Meziprostor, Ateliér, č. 12/2005, s. 4