Katarina Brunclíková

She was born on 9 July 1977 in Cheb. Graduated from the Institute of Creative Photography (MgA.). She is a freelance photographer. She lives alternately in Prague and Tourrettes-sur-Loup, South France.

Awards - 2006 Fujifilm Euro Press Photo Award (set of photographs Prague)

Katarina Brunclíková displays a distinct painterly sensibility while always pursuing a particular theme and concept, in which she freely crosses the boundaries of precisely defined artistic areas. She chooses diverse technical methods. She is attracted by the possibilities of photographic stylization of reality in front of the lens. More and more often, she works inventively with the psychological aspects of colour. At the same time, however, it is obvious that she is not only concerned with beautiful images, but that she tries to use the very emotionality of impressive compositions, visual metaphors and symbols as well as shape analogues and contrasts to self-reflexively express her own experiences, feelings and moods. She likes to experiment with light, which she sets and transforms in various ways. She uses different, often unusual light sources. She actually paints with light, counting on movement and light transformations during exposure. Katarina Brunclíková's work is not and cannot be easily interpreted in words. Her being visual gives a huge space for us, the viewers, to immerse ourselves with our own life experience into the sensitive soul , which the artist has put into her paintings of this world.

In recent years she has created a remarkable, romantic or rather nostalgic collection of photographs of wilting flowers. Withering has its own special charm and symbolic meaning. She thinks long and hard about her choice of motifs, sometimes combining flowers in different stages of wilting. He uses long exposures to create magical still lifes. In them, shapes that fascinate her emerge from the darkness. The flowers seem to grow from somewhere in the depths of an indeterminate space. Her new body of work is reminiscent of Baroque still lifes, in which the artists handled colour shades and subtle lighting with extraordinary sensitivity. In this way they achieved an incredibly convincing effect, even if they were in a way diverting from reality, which, paradoxically, they actually emphasised all the more. Katarina Brunclíková's contemporary photographs naturally follow all of her previous developments, but they gain a new dimension primarily through a different approach to dealing with light relations. Sometimes she had to wait days or weeks for the plants to wilt and wither in order to get the look she was after. She wanted to accurately depict and represent the structures emerging in nature. She does not use retouching, she respects the passage of time. It is in the last stage that the flowers have a special poetic effect; they are an expression of a departing beauty, which at the moment of extinction can be the most impressive and dazzling. In her work, the artist often reveals her inner world only symbolically and in hints.