ARTE HD
2019–2025

A series of paintings depicting film interiors from various countries. I selected films whose interiors felt familiar or close to me, reminding me of moments from my own life. It was like speaking about myself through the lives of others. Although I chose based on interiors, it turned out that most of the films I selected deal with relationships, love, loneliness, feminist themes, often questions of a “woman’s fate,” usually tragic. I thought about the universality of human needs and desires, that the important things in life are more or less the same everywhere. We all share very similar worries, dreams, and fears, regardless of where we live or what language we speak — we can still understand each other very well. To emphasize this, I left subtitles on the “screen” of the painting in various languages. Often the language of the subtitles does not correspond to the original language — we share our stories in many languages. And because a frequent source of these films was the TV channel Arte HD, I painted these letters on each painting to resemble a television screen. Hence the name of the whole series.

Another aspect I like about this entire project is its nature as a “collective work.” Someone writes a book, someone else makes a film based on it, the film’s production designer creates the interior, and then I paint a picture of that interior — which in reality never actually existed. And in a way, we are all talking about the same thing.

(The installation of the paintings in the dark basement of the Václav Špála Gallery was enhanced by a sound loop — a mix of voices in different languages taken from the films themselves.)