Curator: Pavlína Bartoňová

With its latest exhibition titled Vydat se jinudy/ To take a different path, the White&Weiss Gallery presents one of the most outstanding Czech contemporary artists, Ivana Lomová (b. 1959). Her art is characterized by works in thematic cycles.  Pavlína Bartoňová, the curator, opted for Lomová’s paintings from the past decade, the cycles titled Passengers, Gallery, Prague and Interiors. The exhibition will last until 9 December 2022.

Lomová’s paintings are not a mere imprint of the external world. They are a dream lived awake. She not only draws our attention to a romantic landscape but to the quotidian moments of everyday life of an urban person. Lomová’s artwork captures nostalgia and distress, disillusion from the present era and the loss of the human ability to perceive beauty in the ordinary. Her paintings establish a similar mood as in The Stranger by Albert Camus – it’s Sunday, people go for a hike and you remain alone. She does not examine the motion but a snapshot in time.  Enjoying the silence is equally important to the artist as it is for life itself. Ivana Lomová’s artwork is direct. There are no shortcuts, no mystifying haze of concept, no references to the impossibility of communication. She is loyal to traditional painting – oil on canvas, using oil precisely for its quality of taking long to dry. She does it all herself – she stretches the canvases on frames herself and does the underpaint. The lapse of time along with the beauty of a given moment are key to her, both in the process of painting as well as in the works themselves. 

Ivana Lomová graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. However, she did not pursue architecture. Instead, Lomová has illustrated more than 25 books, mainly children’s books, and has also worked in animation. The beginning of the 1990s marks the beginning of her solo career as a painter. Her works are shown in, among others, the Klatovy Gallery, the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery and in private collections both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She lives and works in Prague.