Renata Jelínková

Bio

Renata Jelínková (*2001) is currently completing her final year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she studies in the Drawing Studio led by Alice Nikitinová and Matěj Smetana. During her studies, she also completed a residency in the studio of Professor Thomas Eggerer at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München). Prior to that, she studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Ostrava in the Painting II Studio led by František Kowolowski and Jiří Kuděla. Her painting practice explores themes of collective memory, the fluidity of recollection, and the distortion of lived experience. Time plays a central role in her work—its documentation, visual articulation, and the awareness of its passage and transience. She is particularly interested in the boundary between remembering and forgetting, as well as in the fleeting nature of human memory. Her work is rooted in places she has personally visited. Rather than depicting them faithfully, she extracts only selected elements—compositions, fragments, objects, textures, or colour palettes. Through a process of reduction, she pares the image down to its essentials, deliberately allowing empty space to become an active component of the composition. The removal of superfluous elements reinforces both the overall impact of the work and the relationships between colours. Jelínková approaches motifs of decay and abandonment with sensitivity, playfulness, and a spirit of inquiry. She combines traces of the past, whether they belong to identifiable individuals or anonymous lives, and seeks unexpected connections and absurd details within seemingly ordinary spaces. Her paintings evoke a distinctive sense of calm that gradually gives way to tension, inviting layered and open-ended interpretations.