Tereza Kabůrková’s work is, by its nature, closer to the paintings from the turn of the 20th century than to the current understanding of photography. This graduate of Pavel Baňka’s studio at UJEP in Ústí nad Labem is fascinated by light, colour and space. She lives part of the year in the Šumava region, in the village of Týnec, where she spends her moments of isolation alternating between reading Chinese philosophy, watching clouds and heating with stoves (and let’s not forget the birds, the grass, the lizards and the wind – she adds over the phone) and where she wiles away her time almost as a Sunday painter. Her seriousness and intensity bring to mind, however, her efforts in the Modernist fight for the independence of art, even if she is still plagued by doubts about whether such efforts make sense. Tereza sometimes paints, sometimes she draws, and as of late she takes pictures of simple objects (a chair, tables, windows), which she later renders in a Prague photo shop into pictures for admirers of simple beauty. Although as a superb printer she takes part in the enlarging of photographs for backers of photographic gestures and purity I. Pinkava, V. Jirásek, P. Baňka, she leaves her own just perfunctorily bare.
She established her own style and orientation at school through auto-erotically-tuned nudes filled in with animal silhouettes on the photos and also mainly with her final project work, Krajinářství (Landscaping) – a combination of Svoboda-esque blow-ups with colour prints. These were followed by black-and-white explorations of kitchen units, full of colour commentaries on the uneasy period of her then relationship (Jsem nešťastná, mám mokré boty a nevím, jestli mám opustit svého muže – I’m unhappy, I have wet shoes and I don’t know if I should leave my husband). She expanded her fields of interest to include Chinese art. This culminated in the exhibit at Prague’s Entrance Gallery, which consisted of photographs of individual objects formed as a mosaic stripped of the Western European perspective illusion of space. Meanwhile her last exhibit at the Image Room in Ostrava’s Fiducie was a temporary return to the European milieu and, once again, tradition.
Tereza Kabůrková’s work touches upon two moments that repeat themselves in art history, particularly during periods of great change in human culture and awareness. These are the return to the tradition of subject matter and media, enriched of course by contemporary topics. The following of historical patterns in art is not meant to compromise means of imaging, but rather to rediscover the situation prior to the democratisation of media, when the image was still an elite commodity and was treated as such with a commensurate degree of respect. Similar to painting today photography has its conceptual and transcendental fields, whose backers sometimes accuse one another of artistic untruths. This latter however is not important. It concerns mainly a divergently-expressed perception and experiencing of the world, which sets conditions for basic priorities. One time on a walk in the hills with Tereza, as I was peering over my glasses at the nature, she recalled how her father as a boy was able to catch sight of the most far off birds of prey in the sky.
