The exhibition “Creatures on the Table” marks the first solo presentation by Czech painter and illustrator Hana Puchová in Slovakia. White & Weiss Gallery will present a selection from her current series of paintings, centered on floral still lifes that balance between the intimacy of everyday life and the festive uniqueness of the moment. A significant portion of the exhibited works was created specifically for this exhibition.

The stylized flowers in vases offer the artist a broad emotional and semantic spectrum within which she can move freely between simplicity and opulence, the ordinary and the ceremonial. However, the objects in their immediate surroundings anchor these scenes in the mundane space-time of everyday life, into which cut flowers enter as extraordinarily sensory events. The experience of beauty associated with our custom of decorating our homes with flowers always varies depending on the type, quantity, and arrangement of the chosen plants. A sort of added value is the painter’s play with surface and volume, thanks to which the stems, leaves, and petals appear more robust and corporeal—like fleshy beings and living partners in the painter’s personal life.

The growing attention paid to Hana Puchová’s work reflects a broader shift in evaluative criteria within (not only) Czech visual art. The personal perspective of her work is highly valued, taking on an almost diary-like character, particularly in her drawings. The artist’s approach to everyday life does not involve an ironic reduction to banality. On the contrary, in her paintings and drawings, mundane scenes are part of lived reality, which has both serious and humorous aspects, a personal dimension, and a gently implied social dimension. Alongside all this, Puchová engages with the tradition of European painting, with its historical and modern genres, while simultaneously connecting painting as a form of high art with its long-neglected sibling—illustration.

Hana Puchová’s personal and professional career has been linked to the art scene of her native Ostrava since the second half of the 1980s. She received her formal art education at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. After returning to Ostrava, she taught for many years at an elementary school for Romani children, while simultaneously pursuing fine art. Since last year, she has been leading the Painting 1 studio at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava.