Jana Vojnárová (*1982, Prague) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague; she studied in the studios of Vladimír Skrepl, Michael Rittstein and guest teacher Silke Otto Knapp. She also completed a study internship at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2014 she won first prize in the Kunstpreis der Leinemann-Stiftung competition in Berlin. She is a masterful painter, for whom the human (especially female) figure has long been the basic building block of a painting, usually abstracted and fragmented, fused with an indeterminate pictorial space.
The mosaic of separated colored surfaces, increasingly characteristic of her recent paintings, is in a way a parallel to the expression associated with the second distinctive disposition of her work, which consists of collages on paper. In these, Vojnárová combines (often expressive) painterly gestures with cut-out photographs or book illustrations.
The new series of collages and paintings presented at the exhibition The Nineteenth Story of Chagrin at the Galerie mladých uses traditional archival family photographs, accompanied by images of Slovak folk costumes, and is also inspired by illustrations from the French children’s book “Thirty Stories in Pictures” from the early 20th century.
