Veronika Vlková is a member of the young generation of artists active on the art scene in Brno. From as far back as her time at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, her work has moved between several different media. It often features subtle drawing and water colours on paper and possesses a narrative character and poetry. It has illustrative overtones reminiscent of phantasmagorical stories and dream visions. These are often based on the artist’s own visual memory, childhood and imagination. Vlková is inspired by natural elements and non-European landscapes and cultures such as those of Iceland, China and Japan, along with the specific ways those cultures perceive the world, and their spirituality, customs and rituals. These influences feed into a personal mythology and a unique visual language. Her pictures feature mysterious figures between cliffs and volcanoes, half man, half beast, bare trees and twigs, fire, flame and other repeating motifs. Her work often occupies both space and movement. Exhibitions featuring her work often feature a combination of static and moving image combined with objects. Nevertheless, the overall effect with all its associations and dialogues between individual works and the viewer is of supreme importance. This then creates a free narrative line that varies depending on the way each of us perceives it.
Vlková often works with other artists, designers, animators and musicians. She herself is a musician and her output, which uses classical and experimental instruments combined with samples, is created in parallel with her artwork. At this point it is worth mentioning the music group TEVE that she founded with Antonín Koutný, and the current project Salvia she is involved in along with Kateřina Koutná. Within the context of contemporary art her audiovisual events on the boundary of exhibition, concert, animation and performance are especially noteworthy. Since 2011, she has been collaborating with Jan Šrámek (VJ Kolouch), and over time the two have gradually created an idiosyncratic visual language. Their exhibitions explore the boundaries of narration, the extrusion of the image in space, and the creation of compact interactive environments. The typical features of both artists – lyricism and imagination in the case of Vlková, and the technical and dehumanised aesthetic of Šrámek – encounter each other in animations and illustrations. A good example is their well known animated film Bubi (2011), which won top price in the category of best non-narrative/experimental film at Anifest 2012 and subsequently appeared at their joint exhibition in Školská 28 Gallery Prague, where it formed part of an installation within the very different context of a gallery space. The lonely figure of the girl dressed in the fur of a wolf wanders through a post-apocalyptic landscape full of abandoned prefab housing estates, ruins and wrecks, and along with stones, rocks and bare trees represents the last remains of nature and life itself. Though the story is minimal and we find no classical film narrative techniques, it would be over-simplifying to call it non-narrative. This ambiguity is what both artists are drawn to, and both are fully aware that the story is largely formed in the viewer’s own mind.
This became the central theme in the artists’ next exhibition project Source (Fait Gallery, Brno 2014). Here they arrived at an integrated style in which it is difficult to say for certain where the work of one ends and the other begins. A central role is played by real-time experience and the movement of the viewer around the space, a point succinctly made by the curator Martin Mazanec: “The vitalisation of figures from water colours and drawings in previous exhibitions was accomplished by means of animation and editing on which both artists collaborated with Martin Búřil. The current project works most expressively with reality in the exhibition of experienced time. This leads to reflections on the momentum of images that are static but move freely within the environment of a landscape that has not been defined in advance. [Martin Mazanec, essay accompanying the exhibition Source, Fait Gallery, Brno 2014]
The next projects in which Vlková and Šrámek explored the themes already referred to in different ways was Lost Perspective (Chodov Fortress, Prague 2012), The Magic of Forgetfulness (Blansko Gallery, 2013), You Reap What You Sow (NauGallery, Prague 2013) and the exhibition Losing (TIC Gallery, Brno 2015), in which they were inspired by Japanese culture and aesthetics along with the harmonious timelessness it gave rise to.
Vlková’s work is characterised by layered thinking that places formal problems side by side, such as the exploration of animation and illustration within contemporary art, and, on the other hand, a psychological and emotional level combined with an interest in the means by which we are able to perceive and imagine, the origins of stories, and how our thoughts are formed. However, these layers are not separate but operate in parallel, mutually complementing each other, as the artist herself says: “One is usually exhibited in such a way that it works in both directions, as a metaphor for the other, like body and soul.”
