Fotograf Magazine

The work of Tereza Kabůrková (1980) is an oscillation between photography and painting, and is manifested in both media. A free and original understanding of drawing penetrates her photographs, pervading them and being transformed by them in turn, in a (futile?) search for an ideal language.
“I photograph what I see, and draw what I feel,” says Kabůrková. Although it was photography that she primarily studied (at the secondary school of graphic design in Hellichova, Prague, and the BA program at the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design in Ústí nad Labem), drawing is to her a sort of antidote to the dictates of photographic representation. The contradiction between the dispassionate gaze of the camera and the freedom of drawing was expressed ias early as her cycle Zvířátka (Animals, 2001) consisting of composite images of animals drawn on glass against a background of blurred photographs of landscapes. The lifelessness of photography intersects with the vivacity of the imagination; drawing shows that reality lies somewhere else.