Ester Knapová's solo exhibition at Studio PRÁM in Prague.

Ester Knapová: Létem do tmy
Curated by Kateřina Hochmuth
23 August – 13 September, 2022
Studio PRÁM,  Prague

Landscape: only your immediate experience of the detail can provide
the soil in your soul where the beauty of the whole can grow.
Dag Hammarskjöld

As we climbed a little way up the hill, I turned around. Cherry blossoms were whitening everywhere I could see. The entire cherry valley was white and green—all flowers and grass. And the river flowed in the middle, gleaming silver. How did I not notice such beauty before? Through dreamscapes we discover what was long lost. We often remember only the impression we are trying to reproduce, fulfil, or just fleetingly capture. Why are the very first memories so intense? Can we count on them? And is their veracity important?
Ester Knapova's work emerges as an atlas of imaginary landscapes in which one can scroll endlessly, return, and find the possibilities of one's own intimate confession. The painting, deliberately complicated, repeatedly repainted, and sometimes looking for its most economical form, becomes a process so much like reminiscing. The author admits the need to build her current artistic creation from her own childhood, with inspiration here reduced to the experience itself. She approaches the canvas like an architect approaches the landscape; human figures are no longer at the forefront of it, but they perfect it, giving it a dimension of reality, of life. "You know, if you've got the character in the book figured out pretty thoroughly, then it is moving around on her own... it's not my intention…" Daisy Mrázková once said. That's how it is with Ester Knapová's canvases. Ester becomes a poet of worlds where time passes gently, in accordance with the natural order, where adults become children again - in a landscape that no longer belongs to the painter, but to the viewer.
And we don't have to rush at all. We can bathe in the pool if we want to. (...) I'm going to sit with you for a while. The picture is perfect because it is universal. Time is perfect if it doesn't exist. Happy days are lived through summer into darkness. The leitmotif of the exhibition is light. I deliberately won't say a word about the photograph because it's absent. "It's also essential for me to experience nature intensely, the strong relationship of me as a child to nature, which I'm not quite able to feel anymore," emphasizes the artist. We're trying to find out something seemingly forgotten, and that need for familiarity intensified during the pandemic. At the same time, in a meditative (post-)covid dialogue, Ester Knapová offers reconciliation with nature as the one that gives and takes life at the same time. The spoken prayer calls for recollection, the desire is in the present, and let all that is experienced be cyclical. The whole Cherry Valley is white and green - all flowers and grass.

THE EXCERPTS ACCOMPANYING THE EXHIBITION COME FROM THE CHILDREN'S BOOK ABOUT JOURNEY TO THE MYSTERIOUS LAND OF NANGILAJA.

Childhood is an essential theme in artworks of the visual artist Ester Knapová, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. As a starting point, she often uses family photo albums, to which she gives completely new and vivid content with her reworkings. In contrast to photography, which relentlessly reproduces a unique record and feels definitive and almost strange, Ester Knapová's paintings come across as intimately close, regardless of the underlying inspiration. In recent years, her work has been characterized by a shift from a realistic image to a mere imagination or memory. The result is mature impressionable landscapes specific to their blurring and pastel colour filter, without the aesthetics thus chosen being remotely evocative of excessive sentiment. The search for new ways of artistic expression in the traditional medium is one of the current directions in world art.

Ester Knap (b. 1993) is among the distinctive authors of the youngest generation of the Czech art scene. She studied in the studio of Vladimir Skrepl, Jan Šerých and Jiří Kovanda. In 2019, she took part in an art internship at the Browse  Darby Gallery in London. She was nominated for the Critics' Award for Young Painting in 2020, during which she received the Audience Award. Her work is primarily represented in private collections.

Solo exhibitions: Oči obzoru (Galerie Vyšehrad, Prague, 2022), Borůvky (Galerie Jelení a Galerie Kurzor, Prague, 2021), Malí indiáni aneb Úkryt v metafoře (Oblastní galerie Vysočiny, Jihlava, 2021), Ze zahrady (Café Tvaroh, Prague, 2020), Sluneční brýle (Kavárna Pod lipami, 2019), Zpátky ve vysoké trávě (galerie sklad M1, Prague, 2018), 1998 (Ideal Prostor, Prague, 2018)

Photo: Anna Pleslová