Patricie Fexová

(b.1975) graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Prague, in Painting Studio 2 of Professor Vladimír Skrepl.


Patricie Fexová does not have the sort of clean-cut hand that allows immediate recognition of her work. It is thus all the more surprising to see her paintings of wrung-out clothing and a studio followed by Bill Gates sporting an erection and lying in the grass, or a one-meter-long black asphalt slug.
She conceived her graduation work in a more or less photographic manner, manipulating photos of bunkers on a computer without looking into the traumatic history of pre-war Czechoslovakia. Fexová found the bunkers visually interesting but good for nothing — they will never be used again. She worked with them in a manner fit for the 21st century: fitting them into her sci-fi story, in which war is just a media phenomenon. The bunkers were connected to greenhouses and were complemented by some kind of land art puddles. Fexová has removed all traces of past civilizations, such as telegraph poles and people.
Preceding these photographs was an Australian series entitled Prehistoric Coves. Each piece was made simply, by overlapping several slides, and the resulting images questioned the extent to which they could be connected to reality or to what the viewer really saw.
Two recent large-format paintings referred to the shifting meaning of painting as it is being confronted by new media. It is as if her meticulous paintings of a horse and a burning forest had been created as wallpaper design for a snobby hunting cabin. They’re so strange that they’re beautiful. They warn with their seeming simplicity that we are at risk of becoming over-saturated by images.

01.02.2001