Kamila / about author

Kamila Ženatá studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the years 1973–1979 and graduated from the studio of Professor Ladislav Čepelák.

At the beginning of her artistic career Ženatá devoted herself to printmaking, especially intaglio techniques. She participated in many exhibitions and biennales at home and abroad. She created large-scale graphic series (e.g., Transformations of nature, 1981; Anatomy of an orchard, 1990) and became a member of the Hollar Association of Czech Graphic Artists. At the turn of the millennium, she ceased her graphic work and began to concentrate on drawing and painting. She gradually expanded her artistic expression to include the media of video and text, and her projects matured into conceptually harmonised wholes. Inspired by dreams, imaginings, memory, and the individual and collective unconscious, this systematic and informed work has resulted in a series of exhibitions dealing with the themes of trauma, loss, and emotion. These projects have become conciliation rituals of a sort (e.g., The 2nd Floor, 2009; The Women’s Yard, 2012; Event Horizon, 2015, 2016, 2017; mycelium, 2022; My Shoes, Your Shoes, 2024).

The work of Kamila Ženatá cannot be classified as belonging to any group trends of the domestic art scene of the last several decades. Her solitary and at the same time intensely communicative artistic statement is characterised not only by a wealth of sovereignly mastered expressive facets (printmaking, painting, video, site-specific work, installation) but above all by a complex human and spiritual message. Inspired by Taoism, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, and psychedelic experiences, she explores the possibilities of expressing the inexpressible.

Since the 1990s she has also been involved in psychoanalytic group psychotherapy. She is a guest member of the Czech Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, leads closed groups, and organises workshops for the public.

She has authored both fiction and psychotherapy books.

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Kamila Ženatá represents an unusual phenomenon on the Czech art scene. As a trickle that gradually grows stronger in the river, the graphic studio student gradually became a painter, a multimedia artist, a therapist, and an author of literary texts. It consistently follows two guidelines in its creation. One is memories, dreams, memory, networks of relationships and influences (the field of the unconscious) and other principles that operate outside conventional time and space. The second is the observation and recording of natural phenomena and their states. A common field of two interests is the understanding of the world as a game of energies that, in an unspeakable cycle, transform seamlessly into stories and contexts.

Helena Cox, Art Curator at Uni of York, 2016

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The contrast between the spartan environment of the studio in which Kamila Ženatá forms and the images produced in it could not possibly be greater. Fine strands of fibrous cell structures as well as stellar nebulae can fit on a canvas format that can be carried by one person. Suspended side-by-side in the gallery space, they can then take their breath away. A series of new paintings by Kamila Ženatá is not a set of trial, error and the search for themes. It’s a sovereign visual record of a miraculous world of which we ourselves are a part so tight that we don’t see it. But only until everything feels like the beginning of the world.

Leoš Válka, director of the DOX Center for Contemporary Art, 2024

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One of the highlights of the group exhibition, which is supposed to be (and is) a „reconciliation ritual of sorts“, is the room in which Kamila Ženatá put her shoes. They’re after her mom, and the author planted flowers in them so that one extinct life would go on in another form. A very nice idea and realisation.

Jan H. Vitvar, Respekt, (exhibition of the week: My shoes, your shoes, HYB4, Prague) 2024

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