Renata Jelínková

Renata Jelínková (*2001) is in her final year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, studying in the Drawing Studio under Alice Nikitinová and Matěj Smetana. She previously studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Ostrava (Painting Studio II of František Kowolowski and Jiří Kuděla).

In her painting she explores themes of collective memory, the mutability of recollections and the distortion of lived experience. Time plays a fundamental role in her work – recording it, giving it visual form, becoming aware of its passing and transience. She is interested in the boundary between remembering and forgetting, in the fleeting nature of memory.

She draws on places she has visited in person. She does not set out to reproduce them; she takes from them only a composition, a fragment, an object, a combination of textures or a colour scheme. She reduces the image considerably and also works with emptiness. Removing superfluous elements helps her achieve the overall effect and the colour relationships.

She works sensitively with the motif of deconstruction and neglect, approaching it with playfulness and an inquisitive spirit – combining elements and traces of the past, whether they belong to specific or entirely unknown people. She focuses on finding combinations and absurd details in seemingly ordinary spaces. She seeks to create a peculiar calm that sometimes shifts into tension. The paintings thus evoke far more complex and ambiguous feelings.