Marie Paterová

She grew up in the picturesque village of Kajlovec in the Moravian-Silesian Region, and in nearby Hradec, attending the community arts school, the atmosphere of the town itself and its castle led her to an interest in music and art. She passed through the darker Opava, where her adolescence was enlivened by the School of Applied Arts, where she studied graphic design. This was followed by admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), to the studio of Michael Rittstein. Later, through twists of fate, she moved through many studios, of which perhaps the most significant was the studio of Vladimír Skrepl, who awakened the significance of her work. At the same time, shortly after school, she seeks her grounding in the world and in society, which she reflects through painting, text, and various other media.
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She captures meaning while wandering, finding herself on different paths, at their ends and on returns back to the center. The journey is accompanied by the usual symbols and quotations that flash by along the way. They appear on a phone or on billboards along the roads. Words turn into shapes and shapes into words, and sometimes they form a familiar face. The infinity symbol represents paths, alleyways, dead ends that circle around the core of one’s personality and metaphorically shows a view of “traveling” from a bird’s-eye perspective, as well as from different moments on a specific path.
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Effortless Immersion (exhibition text)

From a place and time where the mood and initiative to immerse oneself in something are lacking, in the secure fortress of latent depression, the possibility arises to transfer this state into another space. Expectations from a change of environment are, to be safe, no longer any, as one has learned through various trials this defense against being spellbound. Constant escapes from oneself, including one’s own opinions and relationships, craving new beginnings, the desire to erase it all and try again, better. Yet the inner configuration, no escape will change that, and for a reinstallation there is neither time nor energy. So at most, perhaps rest, stop those processes, catch one’s breath, cry it out underwater, stay a while in that blue color, and one day, when we are ready and the environment is favorable, we will use the demons in the fight for our own souls.