Hana Garová: Samomluvy / Soliloquies

SOLILOQUIES To live solely within oneself, at the mercy of the creative urgency. Absolute concentration. The transcendence of everyday life. The artist’s personality is inevitably reflected in their work. Naturally introverted tendencies foster a focus on the inner world. The cultivation of imagination gives rise to the realm of fantasy. The innermost testimony manifests in the appearance and materialization of dark figures from fantasy. The pictorial world mirrors the landscape of ideas, evolving beyond its initial impulses through the creative process. The dynamic interplay of eye and hand, imagination, and distortion. Hybrid life forms of indeterminate genus and species are embedded within the very fabric of the paintings—your own face, held captive among monsters. Sorting through ideas in the creative process means gradually sinking into oneself. What matters most is what directly affects you—situations, whether political or personal. Then there is a deeper layer, where you grapple with unsolvable problems. You keep turning them over inside, you get angry, sometimes you even forget what you’re painting… The ideal state is when you let go of all that and focus only on the act of painting. When you abandon self-dissection, which can’t be solved anyway because it becomes entangled within a person. Embrace your more analytical side and begin working differently. Doubts arise. The need to articulate it somehow—more intellectually, beyond simply saying, ‘they paint from themselves because they feel that way...’ The inability to fully define a theme or express it. Unconventional starting points. The paintings are anchored in reality. Repeated trips around the outskirts of Prague. Quiet observation outdoors. Vegetation, vistas, and lights. Capturing visible forms without striving for optical precision. Fixing the image in the moment of inspiration. Liberating the painting process from complicated, cyclical thinking. Pure, unencumbered painting—free from the ‘obligation’ to find meaning or invent a narrative. Creating with greater ease and directness. ‘We truly only create when we have something to say, driven by the necessity to express ourselves.’ (O. Redon) HANA GAROVÁ (*1986) lives and works in Prague. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (2007–2013) under Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda. Her artistic interests now lie predominantly in painting, drawing, and monotype. She seamlessly combines figuration and abstraction. Her expressive paintings are deeply rooted in reality, layered with a rich, dark imagination materialized through energy-charged brushwork. The driving forces of narrative and movement are vibrant color masses and hybrid figures. The painting process itself plays a vital role—images evoke other images, and urgent themes carve their own path. Hana Garová’s solo exhibition at the Bold Gallery in Prague features entirely new, previously unexhibited paintings that reflect a more analytical approach. The selection of works is based on contrasts of pure color shades—distinctive blues, reds, greens, with accents of yellow and purple. Figures and figurative compositions hold a dominant place in the paintings, significantly shaping the structural frameworks of their content. A notable development is the expanded presence of landscape features and structures, rendered in striking watercolor-like washes of saturated color. The author explores her pictorial themes through various techniques and approaches, reflecting the diverse range of painting challenges she engages with. The transition from one painting to another is abrupt and spontaneous, yet seemingly disparate works are unified by underlying internal connections. Hana Garová has exhibited in both established galleries (the House of Arts, České Budějovice; Trade Fair Palace, Prague; Adam Gallery, Brno; Zahorian & van Espen Gallery in Prague; the Galerie etc., Prague; Photoport, Bratislava, SK; Galerie arto.to, Uhelný mlýn – Libčice nad Vltavou) and alternative spaces (the Garage Gallery, Prague-Karlín; Hotdock project space, Bratislava, Slovakia; Industra Art, Brno; Holešovická šachta Gallery, Prague). She was a finalist in the prestigious Slovak competition for young painters, the VÚB Foundation Award for the Painting of the Year 2017. In 2024, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia, and received an award from the Novum Foundation in the same year. Her work is represented in both gallery and private collections.