Kateřina Ondrušková

Kateřina Ondrušková works with natural motifs in her paintings, with an emphasis on greenery and flowers. Her deeply personal art is primarily inspired by cultivated nature and built gardens, sceneries which she fuses with melancholic fragments of memories. Using her natural surroundings as an inspiration, she abstracts and intuitively assembles these sceneries with personal anecdotes from her daily life – collecting garden flowers in the summertime for example, or having a quiet picnic with her son – into a rhythmic choreography of colour and movement. 

Ondrušková’s colour palette is guided by taking inspiration from the respective seasons during which she is painting. From swirls of foliate green in spring to the warm ease of fall, and the radiant blooms in summer to the dark sublime of winter landscapes. Her compositions often combine close-ups of the referred natural formations and flower gardens with figures that mysteriously emerge or disappear into the background, scratched into layers of thick impasto, which allow viewers to navigate her dreamlike floralscapes through her bold, gestural brushwork. In addition to nature, her son also represents a great source of inspiration. Everyday objects such as toys and motifs that appear in her son’s life is reflected in her paintings using various adapted forms, and often the artist leaves small areas of raw, untreated canvas in her finished compositions to contrast against a wide range of vibrant colours. The superimposed, overlapped, and hidden layers serve not only to extend the numerous perspectives in her pictorial spaces, but also encourage viewers to bring our own intuitive interpretations to life. 

Kateřina Ondrušková (b. 1991, Czech Republic) lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2019. Following her studies, she took up an internship at the Berlin studio of Czech conceptual artist Robert Barta (b. 1975) in 2020. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Perennials, Platforma 15 Contemporary Art Space, Prague (2023); Down in the woods, up to the sky, Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); and Rampant Flora, Galerie Okraje, Tábor (2022). As part of Art Basel Hong Kong’s VIP Programme, she participated in the second edition of Symbiosis at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2023, which introduced major contemporary artists from Czech Republic to Hong Kong for the first time.