WITH BEATING HEARTS WE WAKE UP

Anežka Hošková is an intermedia artist who was one of the first to bring awareness of the international Emo-Romantic painting movement to the Czech environment. Her work combines a strong emotional charge as well as interest in spirituality and mysticism with the influence of the visuality of alternative music subcultures, which are close to her heart. In times of multiple crises, turning to the subject, its intimate perceptions and the secret realms that transcend our rational understanding has become one of the relevant ways of awakening a deeper receptivity and sensibility to other beings as well as to the entire world. Through this introspection, Anežka Hošková’s work naturally leads us to the world’s current issues including climate change, feminism, or identity and relationship crisis. Anežka Hošková primarily considers herself a drawer, but she also paints and often also creates objects as well as performative installations in which she becomes part of the scenic work of art. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in traditional arts and crafts techniques and, in addition to stained glass, she has also started experimenting with three-dimensional glass objects that further develop her distinctive expression, which is primarily based on drawing. In Hošková’s work, the freedom of expression, her playfulness, intuition and stimulating creative associations are connected with the ideas of ancient cosmologies that considered the element of water a primordial substance. It is not only the liquid nature of the watercolour paintings that leads us to the metaphor of being connected with the world at the deepest level of the primordial forces; it is also the drawing-defined shapes of the symbols and ornaments with which the author has been working for a long time. While in her earlier work, she used a syncretic mixture of mainly mystical and magical symbols of various origins, currently, floral symbolism with fragments of the human body is dominant in her work. In Anežka Hošková’s paintings of weeping flowers and flaming hearts, the vitalistic idea of the living nature comes to life, which is now newly materialized in the form of three-dimensional objects made of glass. Simple flat objects made of transparent glass bring a distinct calming to her work. The purity of the material in the sharply defined ornamental shapes brings us back to the idea of “lakes fed by cosmic tears that flow from all of nature”, to conclude with Gaston Bachelard’s apt imagery. Anežka Hošková is one of the distinctive personalities of the contemporary art scene. Her work has long been associated with the alternative music scene: she is a co-founder of the A.M.180 Collective, A.M.180 Gallery and the Creepy Teepee festival in Kutná Hora, while she herself also performs as DJ Black Dumpling. Since 2018, she has also been intensely working with glass, especially stained glass. In 2024, she participated in the International Glass Symposium IGS in Nový Bor, where she created her first three-dimensional glass objects, which she now presents on a larger scale. She graduated from Václav Stratil’s Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology (2001-2007) and completed scholarships at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Cuenca, Spain (2006) and the Magyar Képzőműmvészeti Egyetem in Budapest (2003). She regularly participates in workshops, lectures and discussions; in 2023, she was one of the lecturers in a series devoted to 21st century Romanticism at the Plato Gallery in Ostrava. She often has exhibitions both on the Czech and the international independent scene, as well as in important institutions such as the Prague City Gallery, the Bratislava City Gallery, the Centre for Contemporary Art Kim? in Riga or Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at GASK in Kutná Hora and Karpuchina Gallery in Prague.