Fotograf Magazine

“Going from painting to moving image is like running into the countryside.” (Dana Balážová, 2011) This is how we could characterize the development of both Katarína Hládeková and Anna Balážová’s work of the past two years. They met in the Studio of Painting 3 at FaVU in Brno, where they both practically stopped painting. Their thesis works – Anna’s Bachelor’s and Katarína’s Master’s – entirely abandoned the traditional medium of painting. But perhaps the reason for their renunciation of the medium’s own highly set standards was much rather a clash with the limits that the medium of painting carries in itself, mainly in regards to the narrative side of representation. Both of them, in their thesis works, used spatial installations in the form of models: Anna as props for experimenting with visual transmission (Dvojí trojí/Double Trouble, 2010); Katarína as a three-dimensional record of memories and a specific mental map (Dvojdomek/Semi-detached, 2010). They have mutually become closer through these works in terms of content far more than in terms of form; along with an interest in stories, whose set pieces can turn out to be three-dimensional objects. Reflections on a visual series, as a means to develop a story and even to capture its absence, have moved into space.