Anna Kyjovská, née Štefanovičová (b. 1996), was born in Skalica, Slovakia, and currently lives and works in Prague, where she studied painting under Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts. In her art, she focuses mainly on painting, working with larger as well as smaller formats. At the same time, drawings, ceramics and papier-maché form an integral part of her work as well. Almost all her paintings are preceded by simple sketches, usually drawn according to a model from real life. In the process of transferring this sketch onto canvas, she often changes the image as compared to the initial drawing. On the canvas, Kyjovská fleshes out various details and carefully reconsiders the colour composition, though she still takes an intuitive approach to her work with colour. Many of her paintings are accompanied by various three-dimensional objects for which she draws inspiration from children’s, folk and amateur art.
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Anna Kyjovská’s works capture our attention by their use of colour and their playful and abbreviated painting style, which works with basic lines. Kyjovská frequently finds inspiration from ancient cultures, the circus, puppet theatre and children’s toys or souvenirs, incorporating these motifs into contemporary paintings characterized by a distinct stylization bordering on kitsch. She works with symbols and metaphors that reflect personal and collective experience, and she experiments with colour and texture to express the emotions associated with memories. The resulting works contain references to cultural and historical contexts or to historical artifacts, thus illustrating how the past shapes our identity today.