2024-02-19 22:21:42
“I was one of the few who enjoyed drawing a pear and an apple all the time,” recalls the thirty-one-year-old painter Ester Knapová, as she studied at the high school of applied arts in Žižkov, Prague. Her dreamy and nostalgic images say a lot about the contemporary world, mainly because they completely displace it.
In the exhibition entitled Winter Apples, which can be seen at Trafo Gallery in Prague until next Sunday, February 25, we observe blurred figures sitting in the landscape, silhouettes of people raking leaves. Others skate, others simply are.
The figures in the Holešovice gallery are complemented by no less impressive landscapes: a view over the flowers of thistles on Prague’s Slivenec, sharply cut contours of trees.
Ester Knapová in front of the oil painting Skating from 2023. | Photo: Silvie Heřmanská
Most of the three dozen oil paintings were inspired by photographs from the family archive and obscured memories. “This is the cottage we had near Náchod. It’s a beautiful place,” says Knapová in front of a canvas called Skating, in which a girl in a winter overall is speeding across a frozen pond. A wooden house stands in the background. “I often return there in my paintings. When I was thirteen, my parents sold the cottage,” he recalls of an unpleasant moment.
Residential architect and theater designer Karel Lhota, among others the author of the interior of the well-known Winternitz villa in Smíchov, participated in the design of the holiday home. “When I was there on a tour, I found similar elements. Of course, our cottage was not so luxurious, but I recognized the sets of wooden furniture or mezzanines,” says the artist.
He describes the cottage as a beautiful secluded house. “There is a forest, a pond and a meadow next to it. I have a strong feeling associated with it, how a person is alone in nature – you walk through the forest, you know the places and it’s all yours. It’s your space,” recalls Broumovsko.
On the right is the canvas Ice Skating II, which Ester Knapová painted last year. | Photo: Tomáš Rasl
The exhibition evokes a similar feeling of closeness in the viewer. The often scattered contours of persons or objects evoke obscured memories from childhood. They are familiar, but at the same time so distant that one does not know if they really happened.
“Somewhere on the shore there lived a kingfisher,” Knapová points to the generous canvas entitled Kingfisher – Ice Skating II. “I’ve never seen him, only my parents always told me about him,” he explains of the scene in which the silhouette of a skating girl emerges from the landscape in tones of dark green. It is before dark, but the darkness is not in the picture.
“In my head, I have counted the evenings when I skated in the dark. I was just by myself, nothing really happened. I just felt good,” states the painter.
A loner
She was surrounded by art from an early age. Father played and painted, mother enjoyed movies. But Ester Knapová did not dream of a career in art, she rather saw herself as a director or writer. Art kind of happened in her life. She enjoyed drawing and spoke talent that is hard to miss at Trafo Gallery.
“I realized that even such a banal thing fills me up,” she recalls the endless hours of figures or drawing still lifes with fruit.
Ester Knapová: Kulisek, oil on canvas, 2023. | Photo: Tomáš Rasl
While many classmates at the Prague secondary school could not stand the drill, Knapová seemed to be skating again on the pond from her childhood.
“You transfer the object to paper and give it something extra with a drawing. It was one of the few things I was able to concentrate on,” she reflects on her dedication to painting in the era of digital media and boundless postmodernism, when it is possible to exhibit almost anything in galleries.
In Vladimír Skrepl’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, she deviated from the traditional approach. Thanks to the careful and expressive stylization of colors, one can talk about the continuation of the so-called Czech colorism or American luminism, which was popular in the second half of the 19th century. Some canvases, including Blueberry, take on an impressionistic quality, while others, such as Day and Night, veer towards Art Nouveau.
“Classmates filmed videos, engaged in performance art, sculptures, music, installations, video, computer games, gestural painting, everything,” the painter recalls of the variety of Skrepl’s studio. And also how her passion for painting grew thanks to it. “I saw how different art can be, which confirmed me in my path. I realized that paintings are created by themselves and from me.”
In the last pre-pandemic year of 2019, she spent a month in London, where she first saw with her own eyes the canvas of Peter Doig, a contemporary Scottish painter working in Trinidad, Caribbean. “I’ve seen Doig in photos a thousand times, but when you come to that painting, it gives you a completely different dimension,” she says of the creator, who fascinates her with his free and at the same time recognizable expression. “He can paint absolutely anything, however, and it will always feel like his world,” she notes.
The English metropolis, full of renowned galleries and art collections, offered the beginning painter a new perspective and motivation. “In London, I saw paintings that I didn’t even think about here. When you see them live, you get the feeling that painting still has meaning. You realize that it is a powerful medium. I sometimes missed that in Prague,” she compares.
Some of Ester Knapová’s canvases, including Modřín (right), acquire impressionistic qualities. | Photo: Tomáš Rasl
We grew up together
The dreamlike character, elusiveness and timelessness of the images works. Despite the old-fashioned language, Knapová can speak in contemporary speech.
She exhibits regularly, in 2020 she was selected as one of the finalists of the Critic’s Award for Young Painting, which is organized by the Critics’ Gallery. Now, next to Laura Limbourg, born in 1996, she is among the youngest artists to whom Trafo Gallery has offered a solo exhibition.
Next to Bodlák, the current one is dominated by the large-format canvas Modřín. “It grows in the garden of my studio in Slivenec. I grew up there and that tree grew with me for thirty years,” she says of another motif to which she regularly returns. “When I look at old photos, the garden is completely empty,” she says, mentioning details that only she knows.
In order to lighten the atmosphere, she brought out poisonous green on the canvas. “When it has very young needles and the sun shines through it, the shades are actually similar. But of course the colors are exaggerated,” he agrees. “This one is spring, I started painting it last year,” she adds, noting that it takes about a year to create the large canvases. She paints with breaks and the result slowly emerges under her hands.
A series of smaller scenes with black and blue bees also comes from Sliven. “She flew into my studio. I wondered what kind of creature it was. She was beautiful and sitting on white flowers. Dad told me she was a loner,” she describes the bee with shades of metal, whose behavior and species name correspond to the profession of a painter .
Ester Knapová: Recluse II, Recluse I and Recluse III, oil on canvas, 2023. | Photo: Tomáš Rasl
A difficult moment
Knapová remains personal even when she talks about abstraction. “I had a hard time, I was looking at the armchair and I started to draw the fabric,” she says of the canvas entitled Armchair – Love. It shows a detail of the upholstery of an old armchair and has a touch of Fauvism. “Probably out of desperation. I didn’t know how to get out of it,” she wonders why she chose a cover with messy shapes. “In that texture, the system is a non-system. In the end, something like an organ came out of it. Probably a heart. Suddenly, the confusion and despair started to make at least a little sense to me.”
Knapsack canvases are far from a concentrate of carefree memories grafted with fantasies. For example, Blueberries II, in which a girl with blue berries instead of eyes sits in a darkening landscape, has an almost Munchian tone.
But Knapová’s work also contains a disturbing undertone as a whole. “Of course, I also live in these times. And it’s not at all that I see the world as beautiful as in my paintings,” explains the painter when the conversation turns to the climate crisis, culture wars or armed conflicts.
Problems close to her generation are all the more present in Ester Knapová’s paintings, the more they are not there at all.
“It’s an escape to something calm and nicer. Just the fact that I need to escape is not entirely positive,” he says between scenes from his childhood and the dreamy present. “I can’t describe what’s happening right now or what I’m experiencing with a painting. That’s why I don’t do it. That’s why I have to use a metaphor,” concludes Ester Knapová.