Barbora Lungová’s paintings are instantly recognisable. Her generous figural work acts as a commentary on society and entrenched stereotypes. Her main theme is feminism. She is currently completing a doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, in which she examines queer representation in visual art. Her Dobrý fetišismus / Good Fetishism was created under the supervision of Klaudia Kosziba. Specific references or direct quotations are an important communicative element for Lungová. Through familiar motifs in usual groupings and settings she arouses attention and provokes unease. Her paintings often give the impression of being collage-like scenes. She transforms with ease the conflicts that are so difficult to describe taking place in various strata of society into contradictory yet comprehensive compositions.
Lungová is originally from the town of Kyjov in South Moravia, and folklore, along with the traditional rituals of that place, are inscribed in her paintings. Even her own signature, neatly set within a rectangle, resembles a geometric ornament. However, this is not only about adopting the external visuality of folk elements. Lungová also points to the strongly patriarchal elements of folk culture and reveals the character and atmosphere of mass events. In addition to traditional festivals, she includes mass events organised under the previous regime that accompanied her childhood and adolescence, as well as the formation of pop culture idols.
Folk festivities and traditional celebrations serve as a valve for repressed desires, which rise to the surface through frenzied dancing in costume and in a composition suggestively complemented by naked male bodies in paintings united under the ambiguous title Moravská gotika / Moravian Gothic (2009–2013). Lungová thus points to the homoerotic dimension of certain folk dances and rituals. A similar tension appears in the strict self-discipline of the female Spartakiada participants in contrast to the central figure of the “beautiful, cruel young man, to whom the women still willingly submit after the menopause”. The painting is called Theorem, like the film directed by Passolini on a similar theme, namely, the fascination with a beautiful boy to whom gradually all members of a bourgeois family succumb. At the same time, Lungová also depicts the icy calm of the English gentleman and of rock stars, which acts as an analogous cover for strained emotions. In the series Canon, she refers to entrenched gender models only on the face of it unchanging.
Confrontation is a fundamental dimension of Lungová’s work, be this cultural, gender-based or civilisational, or involve the dynamics of youth in opposition to old age. These are highly personal topics for the artist that she herself experiences intensely in generationally and gender diverse partner relationships. She reveals the colourful range of relationships through a complex network of visual compositions in the series Four Balls (2012) and (Im)perfectly Queer (paintings and drawings from 2018 to 2021). In her work up to 2018, young men repeatedly appear in roles traditionally attributed more to girls. They pose naked like nudes of Venus in the paintings of the Old Masters; they are the objects of lustful scrutiny by visibly older men, though not infrequently also by strict women. The figure of the female comrade, the guardian, also features repeatedly in Lungová’s work, sometimes as observer, at other times the driving force behind obscure scenes with a sexual charge. The ironic exaggeration present here serves as a suggestion as to how to reflect on how we take for granted certain situations and structures.
The blending of seeming opposites is also one of the themes of Lungová’s illustrations for the collection of poems I když se umíš smát jak dalajláma / Even Though You Can Laugh Like the Dalai Lama by the poet Andrea Vatulíková (Větrné mlýny, 2021), whose poems are based on her queer identity, a lived experience for both the poet and Lungová. The drawings speak of the non-binary, of the male and female elements in the one soul and one body (as depicted, for instance, by the image of a blonde woman and bearded man in the same position, but infused with a completely different energy).
Lungová has devoted herself to queer and environmental projects, especially in recent years. Examples include her recently published book Hledání šlapanické víry: společenství, rituály, paměť / Searching for the Šlapanice Faith: Community, Rituals, Memory (2022), which explores the role of ornamental plants in the cultural imagination, and especially the story of Jan Dvořák’s Šlapanice chrysanthemums. Lungová collaborated on the publication with a team of writers working at the Brno University of Technology (Marta Fišerová Cwiklinski, Nina Grúňová and Lucie Králíková).
Lungová is also a curator. For ten years she was in-house curator of the Kyjov Gallery Doma, one of the first post-Soviet private galleries in the region, which was founded in 1991 at the instigation of Pavla and Vladmimír Jež. Lungová has also long co-curated exhibitions with her now deceased partner, the art connoisseur and collector Vojtěch Petratur. Among her recent projects is the exhibition Je potřeba starat se o své zahrady / One Must Cultivate One’s Own Garden. This took place in 2021 at the Ján Mudroch Gallery in Senica, Slovakia, and showcased visual artists dedicated to environmental issues.
Lungová is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. At the same time, she remains in her hometown of Kyjov, not only through her paintings, but through her active participation in regional politics, where she advocates for cultural, environmental and queer issues.
In addition she also engages in guerrilla gardening around her studio in Kyjov, and as part of her dissertation project she is building a garden on land she owns situated between fields and vineyards, which is conceived of as a space dedicated to queerness. The garden combines thematic beds planted with different varieties of bearded iris (Iris germanica), which are arranged according to their names to form texts of associative sets. The beds are then arranged according to themes such as “sexist stereotypes”, “decolonised dilemma”, “queerness” or “own love story” and stand in stark contrast to the surrounding environment of perennial grasslands with rare steppe flora and fauna. Lungová was inspired by the garden of gay, avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman and Paul Harfleet’s The Pansy Project, which maps the sites of homophobic attacks with pansy seedlings.
Lungová thus remains a distinctive figure in contemporary Czech panting, whose style and commentary on highly topical issues such as queerness and the environment remain largely unique, fundamental and unmissable.
