Eva Koťátková
Eva Koťátková belongs to the youngest generation of the Czech Republic’s working artists; having arrived on the scene at the beginning of the millennium, these artists comprise the most progressive and productive group on the Czech art scene. Within this conceptually oriented generation, Koťátková stands out for her obsessively reworked pictures; these are linked to deeply personal, intensely felt experience. And a more generalized framework for such experience is gradually surfacing in her work, driven by the set of issues involving the profound conflict between a natural, free community
and institutional structures. Schools, organizations, galleries, clinics, asylums, prisons and research institutions raise us, educate and retrain us, supervise us, and persuade us that the control and the regulation of even our most banal physical tasks result in an efficient economy and even spontaneity. In her extensive installations, Koťátková puts her imagination to work in order to allow us to experience the technology of discipline, in which our bodies grow into restraining mechanisms—surrogates, prostheses and supports of various types. Her installations are not an exterior portrayal of “discipline and punishment,” but an internal portrayal of our society and our suppressed memories. J.S.
more