Kateřina Vincourová Skin Care

I build “cages” and try to capture echoes of my thoughts in them.

I look forward to working with Galerie Rudolfinum, director Julia Bailey and the whole team. It is also a pleasure for me to collaborate with curator Denisa Kujelová, with whom I have a friendship and whose professional interest, support and collaboration on several exhibitions I cannot forget to mention. I am also very happy for the fact that the doors of Galerie Rudolfinum are opening to both Czech and international women artists and I hope that the gallery will follow up with more exhibitions of female artists.

– Kateřina Vincourová

Kateřina Vincourová integrates everything that interests her into her spatial drawings and installations, including the space in which she exhibits. She conceives of the exhibition environment of Galerie Rudolfinum as a landscape, approached as a journey that fluidly transforms throughout the individual spaces. Her work continuously reflects the nature of utopian and dystopian worlds functioning as a critical commentary on contemporary society. In these, she explores the possibilities and characteristics of these permanent and impermanent places, enabling collective experience and awareness through sharing the map of her stories and thoughts. Important for the artist in this specific case is the circular arrangement of individual rooms and their permeability in both directions, where the beginning is simultaneously the end and vice versa. This presents the cyclical nature of all things, the infinite return from end to beginning, destruction and rebirth.

– Denisa Kujelová, curator

About the artist

Kateřina Vincourová (*1968) studied at the V. I. Surikov Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow (1986-1988) and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1988-1994). She has held scholarships at the DAAD in Berlin and the Headlands Centre for Art in California. In 1993 she was awarded the Alexander Dorner Prize in Hanover and in 1996 the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. In her work, she focuses primarily on installation art and object art, often incorporating atypical materials and everyday objects. Along with the mutability of aspects of identity and relationships, she also explores the possibilities of space and its ambiguities. Her solo exhibitions include the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC (2018), Fait Gallery in Brno (2016), the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2001), Météo Gallery in Paris (1997), and Galerie Behémót in Prague (1992). She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions, such as Bittersweet Transformationat Kunsthaus Graz (2016), In a Skirt – Sometimes at GHMP and Moravian Gallery in Brno (2014), After the Wall at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1999) and Home Sweet Home at Diechtorhallen in Hamburg (1997). Her works are housed in significant national and public institutions and private collections.

Curatorial statement

In her drawings, objects, and installations, Kateřina Vincourová brings together everything that interests her, including the exhibition space. She responds to it subtly and yet with great precision, gently disrupting order to draw attention to detail, to the ephemeral, to aspects that are usually overlooked.

Her artistic expression is characterised by a non-standard use of common materials associated with the human body and everyday life: in her installations, they evoke corporeality through physical memory and work with negative space, which not only has a formal function, but also becomes an active field of meaning. Emptiness, gaps, and absence channel the artist’s message – they turn into spaces for projection, expectation, and internal tension. This approach is particularly evident in Vincourová’s spatial drawings, in which objects expand into their environment not as dominant elements but as open structures.

Through her lived practice, the artist accentuates the tension between subjective individual introspection and mediated cultural and social patterns. This opens up space for critical examination of the “architecture of relationships” – structures that are not only physical, but above all relational, symbolic, and ideological.

Her installations thus reflect the processes through which identity is formed and transformed within a dynamic interaction between personal patterns and social narratives, creating a space for sharing where memory and emotional sensations merge with collective experience.

– Denisa Kujelová, curator
May 2025