Ester Knapová

Bio

Ester Knapová (*1993) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2013–2019, Painting Studio II, Vladimír Skrepl’s School). In 2019, she completed a working residency at the Browse and Darby Gallery in London.

Ester Knapová’s paintings can be read as highly sensitive and allegorical introspective probes. Here we encounter a world of expression analogous to the nature of archival photography, albeit with painterly shifts and dreamlike interpretations. The unambiguity of memory is often blurred in favour of a more broadly conceived, complex communicative quality. Knapová situates recurring motifs of landscape fragments, forgotten places, initiatory events and rituals within the period of childhood, thereby elevating it to a natural laboratory for the many concurrent processes that reshape the human being over time. And because time, as a standalone referent, is elusive, it is replaced by places, spaces, figures and objects.