After completing her studies at the Václav Hollar Secondary Art School in Prague, Veronika Bromová went on to graduate from the Illustration and Printmaking Studio headed by Professor Jiří Šalamoun at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She belongs to the generation of students who organised an occupation of universities during the Velvet Revolution in 1989–1990. Although Bromová specialised in illustration and printmaking, her work features mainly installation, photography and performance. However, her artistic activity is much broader; she might even be classified as one of the best known Czech intermedia artists. In addition, she is also involved in gallery operations and teaching, and is an art therapist and psychotherapist. She has huge experience with exhibitions, publications and curatorship. In 1997 and 2000, she was a finalist in the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and in 1999 represented the Czech Republic at the International Biennale in Venice. Between 2002 and 2011, she was head of the New Media Studio 2 (photographic and digital image) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In East Bohemia, specifically between Polička and Litomyšl, she organises a year-round exhibition, educational and cultural programme at the Kabinet Chaos Gallery, where she and her husband Ivan Šrek also organize art meetings and creative residencies and workshops.
Bromová’s main theme crystallises early in her work and is the female body, in particular its vulnerability, fragility and aesthetics. In addition, she often depicts its radical contiguities. Her fascination with the human body is linked to the intimacy of the family circle and natural rituals, but also to the search for the limits of human shame and a certain extravagance. She often works with satire, deconstruction and, to some extent, with a certain mysticism and secrecy. Her work includes experimentation with new technologies, which in turn is intertwined with an interest in nature, spirituality and mythology. She is also involved in civic activism, though issues related to femininity are not primarily perceived as a manifestation of feminist art, which often wants to shock and exhibit, but – as Milena Slavická states in Fotograf Magazine – “Veronika Bromová is interested in the body ‘professionally’”.[1] And so she does not only point to the body and its sexuality. She also refers to other, more hidden content and interpretations, such as the position of the human being in society and in relation to nature. Bromová herself states that she has always been “interested in the human being, its external and internal organisation, the body and emotions, the stories it can tell through the material of the body.” [2]
Bromová has been immersed in the “photographic environment” since she was a child. Her parents, the artists Dagmar and Pavel Brom, used the techniques available at the time to produce a photographic derivative, from which they created collages, subsequently using the photograph, or parts thereof, in their prints.[3] Following on from these visual and technical experiments, during the 1990s, Bromová was one of the first artists on the Czech art scene to exhibit digitally manipulated photographs. She described these as “unpainted images” that underwent processes of “photo-amputation” and subsequent “photo-implantation.”[4] She first drew on what at that time was an experimental technique in a series of photographs entitled Tanec s medicinbaly / Dancing with Medicine Balls from 1993, which she displayed at the exhibition Předpoklady skutečnosti / Assumptions of Reality at the Municipal House in 1994. These techniques then reached their technological apogee in the 1996 series Pohledy / Views, which was innovative from several points of view. In addition to the technical post-production, the series was perceived as progressive in terms of the motif itself, for the way it captured very intimate parts of the artist’s own body, which were furthermore illustrated by views into the interior organs. This “illustration” also points to the fact that Bromová understood these photographs as the “unpainted paintings” referred to above, and their colour scheme and composition is therefore painterly, flat and aestheticising. Bromová examines with almost poignant expression her own physicality, relationships, communication, the theme of the inner versus the outer, identity, and questions of gender and sexuality. The series subsequently became a kind of icon of Czech body art of the 1990s, provoking discussions on feminist art, gender, and visuality as such.[5] The final series of Views was preceded by the exhibition Nová jména / New Names at the Prague House of Photography in 1995, where the first photograph from this series was exhibited, as well as the diptych Rozhovor / Interview presented in 1994 at the exhibition ORBIS Fictus – New Media in Contemporary Art at the Waldstein Riding School.
However, Bromová’s very first cycles include Zakleté princezny / Enchanted Princesses from 1992 and the aforementioned Dance with Medicinal Balls from 1993, exhibited at the Behémót Gallery in Prague. In these works she also focuses on physicality, but leverages it in order to open up other themes. In both cases, she uses the female body as an aesthetic element that completes the overall composition. Her sister, partner and her friend, the photographer Markéta Othová, all appear in the photographs, and the artist herself also becomes a model. Bromová gravitated towards this form of presentation in her childhood, when she tried to approach her idols from the West visually (such as the singer Madonna, who attracted her with her openness and distinctive visuality), but it did not have a major impact on her photographs at first.[6] According to Milena Slavická, the turning point in the meaning of photographing oneself came around 2000, when Bromová’s view of her own body changed, suddenly becoming an important part of the photograph. In this way, the artist shows us her private self, and the photographs become more intimate. An example is the series Moje soubory / My Files from 2004, which is a kind of photographic diary of the author’s life.
An important starting point for Bromová’s artistic work is her family, the background in which she grew up and the things that surrounded her. The relationship with her parents and their influence on her artistic activity was revealed in the exhibition Dopis otci, dopis matce / Letter to Father, Letter to Mother, which took place at the Pitevna Gallery in Brno in 2012. The author attempted to transfer the theme of family and its influence into a spatial installation, in which she brought together various objects, thus creating a kind of family collage. Later, in 2018 at the Fotograf Gallery, she developed this theme in the exhibition Bromfiles, which revealed the work of Bromová’s parents to be both in contrast and in harmony with the work of their daughter.
Bromová also explores social themes. In ZEMZOO, she traces the narrow boundaries between freedom and the lack thereof. The project was subsequently exhibited at the 1999 Venice Biennale.[7] ZEMZOO was created during the artist’s stay in New York, where she was a 1998 artist-in-residence at the ISP (International Studio Program) supported by the Mutual Fund for Understanding and what was at that time the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. This stay in the USA was preceded by an exchange visit by Czech artists to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995, to which Bromová was invited by curator Radek Váňa. During her stay in NYC, she created a slightly melancholic series entitled Kousky mě – kousky NYC / Pieces of Me – Pieces of NYC, a juxtaposition of a self-portrait and a motif from the big city. However, many photographs and videos from this time have not been published publicly or disseminated more widely. It was also during this period that she realised that she was interested in photography as a medium that captured a process in time and space, and began to call her self-portraits “self-performances”.
As already mentioned, Bromová also works with performance, which she combines with photography and other media. This was the case, for example, in the series Království / Kingdom, which she exhibited at the Prague City Gallery in 2008 and which details her journey through life, landscape, feelings and emotions. The kingdom in question is Bromová’s inner world, in which she finds herself in the role of a guide, experiencing a mystical moment that is, however, still grounded by the presence of physical and existential intervention. The title also refers to the fact that her native country was once a kingdom, and by implication it evokes associations with the Kingdom of Heaven (Bromová was inspired by the book The Mustard Seed by the author Osho). Moreover, Bromová was living in Královské Vinohrady at that time. Olga Malá, the curator of the exhibition, says of the series that “It is not the story of the body or the story of a woman, it is the story of a contemporary human. [Veronika Bromová] refers to the elemental human feelings that accompany a person’s journey through life, such as the sadness of loneliness, existential distress and ecstatic bursts of joy.”[8] It is as if we were watching the artist live a myth, which she embodies in her ongoing performance.
In 2014, Bromová had an exhibition at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague entitled Příběh Chaosu / The Story of Chaos. The exhibition recounted the story of the last six years and was a record of radical life changes. She addressed the contradiction between how we show the world to our children and what we are by nature, namely, predators who rule everything and everyone, whose life is therefore manifest in domination: we destroy nature and kill animal and plant species, and we are no strangers to the murder of our own species. During this period, Bromová moved to a village on the border of the Vysočina and Ždárské vrchy regions, where she and her husband Ivan and their children inhabit a former farmstead, to which Ivan – inspired by Timothy Leary’s book Chaos and Cyberculture – gave the name Chaos: “Chaos as a synonym of our times, the search for balance and the balancing of extremes.”[9] Here they also run the Chaos Cabinet Gallery, focusing on professional art and artists working with themes from the humanities and nature.
Nature and natural rituals are playing an increasingly important role in Bromová’s work. She is slowly moving away from technical solutions towards natural materials and turning her work and life towards nature, its power, and the relationship between humankind and nature. Similarly to her exhibition at the Špála Gallery, she is now responding to the current situation with regard to the laws of nature with an installation from spring 2020 entitled Divný jaro, řečí přírody v kruhu koruny / Strange Spring, the Language of Nature in the Circle of the Crown. Here she focuses on events surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on humans, nature and their interconnectedness, with an awareness of body and mind and subsequent unification and healing. Curator Petr Vaňous states that, with this work, Bromová “returns to the thematisation of the disrupted relationship between humans and nature within the context of the pandemic outbreak and against the backdrop of the ecological, spiritual and systemic transformations that can be observed on a local and global scale in recent years… Using methods close to shamanism and ritual, she finds parallels between the visible manifestations of health and illness in the natural world and the human body.”[10] Bromová effects a shift in visual expression and brings it closer to today’s accelerated reality, creating so-called tag-realities, i.e. drawings with a mobile phone. Here, the photograph is no longer just a shot, but a digital scan or drawing; it is a procedural capture of the movement of objects or the artist’s own movement in nature or in another space. It might involve, for example, taking pictures from a train and then compressing the images of reality into condensed scans of outdoor reality. The output is then shorter videos, time-lapse, slow motion, iPad or iPhone drawings embedded in photos, drawn animations embedded in individual photos.
The artist has already worked with this creative principle at an exhibition in the Museum of Arts and Design in Benešov called Skenyreality / Reality Scans in 2019, where she presented the collected reality from our mobile phones. She does not perceive these digital images as photography, but as a scan of the surface of realities – our earth. For her, reality scans symbolise a visual representation of the torn, top layer of our reality, our lived experience – the zeitgeist. Bromová goes on to say that the scans “refer to the fluidity, changeability, fragility and digitalisation of all layers of our lives, and the fact that we are all at the same time content fillers of hollowed-out corporations, transnational bodies without souls, without content, mega-firms that control us and to which we supply content – souls – through our mobile phones and computers.”[11] Skenyreality shows how we have succumbed to these technologies and how, thanks to them, we willingly surrender all our data. They have our fingerprint, face, handwriting, voice, weight, stride length, heartbeat, and they can see into the interiors of our homes, our hearts and brains, the outcome being a “substitution of the place of God.” [12]
Bromová works spontaneously, intuitively and with a certain automatism – her photographs are usually not planned in advance. She photographs her performances and the camera records the process of impulsive creation. Photography thus becomes a medium for the artist to capture the actual moment, which she then transforms, adding other layers and positions. Daniel Vojtěch sums up Bromová’s work as follows: “Veroniky Bromová’s work is not photographic in the sense of refining and expanding the reproductive possibilities of this medium. It is manipulated and painterly: photo-imaging.”[13] Her visual language is clearly legible. She uses her body as material demonstrating her feelings, which she presents to a wider audience in a comprehensible language. A form of exhibitionism is therefore appropriate. Bromová’s photographs reflect her own life experience. She thus plays the role of a guide who mediates the movements of her mind, what she is going through in her life, to the viewers.[14] We might also recall that Bromová considers her Instagram account to be an important part of her own artistic work, where she presents the projects she is currently working on and her state of mind.
In recent years we can observe a clear turn within the art world towards ecological and social issues arising from our current predicament. Bromová works with living material, prints, wood, wax and natural pigments, which she uses more and more often, creating so-called Veroprints or Veromandalas. She also works with cyanotype – a photographic technique using the photosensitivity of iron salts. Bromová’s performative activities are similarly varied – she has worked with Kolouch’s Dream, currently performs with Die Frucht, and creates so-called skirt performances, where during a given ritual she writes down the course of the action on a skirt, which thus becomes its imprint or image.
This brief summary of Veronika Bromová’s artistic activities in recent years reveals her connection with nature and natural principles, which she transforms into her own personal journey presented through art, which – as she wrote for Arbiom.cz – “has a great power to heal both personal and social wounds and ailments.”[15]
[1] Milena Slavická, Veronika Bromová, Fotograf Magazine https://fotografmagazine.cz/magazine/nova-inscenace/portfolia/veronika-bromova/, vyhledáno 3. 8. 2020.
[2] Veronika Bromová, http://planeta-chaos.cz/veronika-srek-bromova-umeni-art/, accessed 2 August 2020.
[3] Mariana Serranová, Veronika Bromová, Dagmar a Pavel Bromovi — Bromfiles — Rodinná manufaktura, accessed 15 August 2020 https://fotografgallery.cz/bromfiles/as.cz/veronika-bromova-kralovstvi-5077794.
[4] Ibidem, https://fotografgallery.cz/bromfiles/#sdfootnote4sym
[5] Reportáž, https://artycok.tv/457/kingdoms, accessed 15 August 2020.
[6] Mozaika, 2020 https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/veronika-bromova-kralovstvi-5077794, accessed 15 August 2020.
[7] See fn. 4. https://artycok.tv/457/kingdoms
[8] Olga Malá, Království dcery svého věku, in: Veronika Bromová Království (exh. cat.), Praha 2008, s. 17.
[9] Planeta Chaos http://planeta-chaos.cz/galerie-gallery-kabinet-chaos/, accessed on 16 August 2020.
[10] Petr Vaňous, DIVNÝ JARO – řečí přírody v kruhu koruny, curator’s text to the exhibition running 5 June – 31 July 2020.
[11] Veronika Šrek Bromová, 25. 10. 2020.
[12] Veronika Šrek Bromová, 25. 10. 2020.
[13] Daniel Vojtěch, Vidět jiná místa, in: Veronika Bromová Království (exh. cat.), Praha 2008, s. 8.
[14] See fn. 6. https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/veronika-bromova-kralovstvi-5077794
[15] www.artbiom.cz/artist/4/veronika-bromova
