Eliška Konečná belongs to a young generation of artists characterised by a return to handicraft and an emphasis on the importance of the material they work with. In Konečná’s case, this involves mainly textiles and wood, from which she creates objects, relief textile paintings and entire installations. She originally studied painting at the studios of Jiří Sopek, Michael Rittstein and Robert Šalanda and Lukáš Machalický at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague between 2015 and 2020. A definite turning point in her work was her internship in the Netherlands at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (KABK Den Haag), where she created her first embroidered picture stuffed with fibre, a method of working she continues to develop to the present day. In her previous works, she depicted the space around her, the intimate area (room, apartment) in which we move. The first “pillow-like” painting, which bulges out into space, depicted a map of this everyday movement that we have, in a way, inscribed in our heads. The abstract-looking work was thus a purely concrete record sewn into the fabric.
Throughout her work Konečná engages with the intimacy of the space in which we feel at home and enjoy privacy, with its inhabitation and sharing. This theme is also present in her diploma thesis, with which she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. Physicality has become an important aspect of her work on multiple levels. For example, corporeality is explicitly thematised in large-scale embroidered textile paintings, in which we see stylised figurative scenes and variously intertwined human bodies or parts thereof. Here, corporeality is accentuated by matter, namely, the relief created by stuffing the embroidery, which accentuates the haptic nature of these works. The works thus invite the viewer to reach out, to touch them, and their dynamism takes on an almost baroque quality: they depict an existential coexistence that can be both harmonious and in mutual strife or struggle, with the boundary between the two poles sometimes difficult to discern. Corporeality is also reflected in Konečná’s carved wooden objects, which do not depict the human body but make reference to its presence. This applies, for example, to screens in which the artist has combined a textile image with wooden framing (Antagonismus Já TY / Antagonism I YOU, AVU 2020), where the theme of the boundaries of shared space appears, as well as to an object called Lavice / Bench (2020), which resembles a seat accompanied by an embroidered cushion, or wooden “shoe soles” on which the word doma (home) is carved.
The nature of textile material plays an important role in the Konečná’s oeuvre, and she works with other types of fabrics besides light canvas. Currently she uses mainly dyed velvet. She presented three large-format velvet paintings entitled Velký spánek / Big Sleep, Velké jídlo / Big Meal and Velká koupel / Big Bath in 2023 at the Polansky Gallery in Prague. The subject matter of the last of these, namely, bathing or floating naked bodies reacting to each other, gesticulating or touching themselves (one of the central figures squeezes a breast from which milk is flowing), as well as the colour palette, in which dark blues and greens alternate with orange and yellow to create a twilight effect, again recall baroque allegorical paintings.
The entire installation was complemented by a wooden object resembling a fence or railing and a kind of drinking fountain on a decoratively carved wavy leg, from the bottom of which a human face emerges (Fontána / Fountain, 2023). Here again, textile and wooden works complement each other, yet – in contrast to the monumental, robust textile paintings – possess a playful and almost surreal character. The human body is literally projected into wooden objects referring to furniture or applied art. This principle is perhaps most evident in the work entitled Nádoba plná slov / Vessel Full of Words (2023), on view at eastcontemporary in Milan, which features a human head resting on three carved legs, with an open mouth filled with transparent marbles. The interplay between reality and dream, the mundane and the bizarre, and the use of playful, straightforward metaphor recalls the classic works of surrealism.
In Konečná’s work we would find many such references. The artist herself, however, draws mainly on her own observation of the everyday world, taking inspiration from ordinary situations from the home environment, which she then laboriously embroiders into paintings or carves into wood.
