Alena Adamíková is an emotional type of an artist. Her obsession with art often recalls the passion of a romantic that is blind to see the pitfalls of reality and who is not afraid of venturing into the outwardly uneven matches. Fortunately, the features of her character include persistence and for the artists rather atypical systemicity, that already occurred at the beginning while searching for her artistic goals. In combination of the mentioned romanticism and the curiosity to search for the meaning of things she´s chosen the human face to be her algorithm. It became the centre of her art world. She treats the portrait subject with caution, aware of its continuous presence in art history. She hasn´t got provoked by the difficult historical weight to deny the representative functions and formal vocabulary of the portrait painting as practiced by the avant-garde artists. She put the question differently, as if in the quieter version, but the more relevant in the context of post-modern art: To what extent a portrait can meet the traditional representative role and yet be a hot topic of contemporary art? What does it mean today - to paint a human face? What is the difference between the beautiful face of Simonetti Vespucii painted by Botticelli in the 15th century and a face painted by a contemporary artist?

 

Written by Beata Jablonská

critic of visual art