Ivana Lomová began her career in the late 1980s as an illustrator of magazines and books (she provided the illustrations for 25 books, mostly written for children), and a maker of animated films. Since the start of the 1990s she has focused on fine art.
To begin with she worked with pastels and had her first solo exhibition in 1997 at the Špála Gallery in Prague. Since then she has worked with photographic templates, especially with pictures from her family album featuring photos of her childhood. Recreation was the theme of most of these works: a swimming pool, the beach at Slapy, a walk with children in a park, a park in Florida (dating back to when she lived with her parents in the USA). Though her pictures are very realistic, they are not hyper-realistic paintings in the true sense of the word, i.e. simply exact repainting and enlargements of photos. Lomová is more interested in the link between photographic objectivity and her own subjective memories. Her pictures are not simply a dry depiction of a given scene, but convey a certain irony, sarcasm and nostalgia.
The same can be said for the rest of her output, also associated for the most part with her family, childhood and children, and always featuring her own emotional experiences.
In 1999, Lomová switched to oils. She painted a cycle of pictures entitled Men and Women, which examines the question of male and female identity. The romantic scenes of these paintings are permeated by what is sometimes almost a caustic irony. She is unafraid of paraphrasing the work of other artists, e.g. Mánes. In the painting Mánesáci – Evening, she replaces the female nude with a male. After this comes the cycle Childhood, in which Lomová returns to her own childhood, as well as reflecting upon her experience as a mother, painting portraits of her own children. This cycle reveals the results of the artist’s encounter with psychoanalysis, and many of the pictures, though depicting the joyful world of children, are imbued with an existential experience of reality in which time comes to a standstill in a kind of suspended motionlessness.
From 2002 to 2004, Lomová created the cycle Till Death Do Us Part, in which she photographed married friends of hers and then painted them. She was interested in the mystery of the relationships of people who share their lives together. In 2005, she created the cycle Time. Her inspiration came from some time she spent in a calm English coastal town called Worthing, where old people move from London to spend their retirement years. Lomová painted them on the basis of photos she took. The paintings depict the tranquillity experienced by these people as they sit on the beach, as well as the sadness, the loneliness, and the impending sense of the end. These pictures are also powerfully existentialist in character.
After 2000, she created another cycle entitled Night, in which she analysed her own transcribed dreams. Here we encounter melancholic landscapes populated by unidentifiable figures (see, for instance, Evening Spectre).
In 2005 and 2006, Lomová painted the cycle Paradise, inspired by her stay in Guatemala. Paintings of tropical landscapes are free of existential angst and full of strong sensory perceptions, the artist’s intoxication with the sun, and lush vegetation. However, this is not simply sensory stupefaction: the paintings also contain an element of mystery, a consistent feature of Lomová’s oeuvre.
An existential subtext returns in the cycle Solitude (2007-2009), which depicts solitary figures, sometimes in intimate situations, for instance in a bathtub. Other paintings show people looking out of windows, empty rooms, a solitary figure, a cat, or a single item. A window is almost always present, the sole mediator between here and there. The latest of the artist’s cycles to date is a series of pictures called Coffee Bars, painted between 2009 and 2011. These depict the familiar intimacy of a coffee bar atmosphere, places where not only clusters of friends gather, but solitary individuals too. They represent oases of tranquillity within the desert of a busy city. Coffee bars as a point of repose, in which time flows in a different way.
Lomová’s paintings, though transcriptions of a reality caught in photographs, are in the end an interpretation of what she sees. The artist transposes, elides, selects, adds, and relies on her fantasies, experiences and emotions. In doing so she creates pictures that go deeper than photography. What at first sight appears to be ordinary scenery is revealed to be a powerful experience and a reflection on that depicted. Nothing is simply surface or appearance. We can always follow… into the unknown. Life as a secret, as unexplored places. This is what is most exciting in the work of Ivana Lomová.
