Artwork details - EVN Sammlung

Rokytník
Jitka Hanzlová

series of 11 C-prints
each 48 × 37 cm (framed)
1990–1994

Acquisition 1996
Inv. No. 0019a-k

Hanzlovás´ portraits of village inhabitants and the world in which they live immediately let you feel that they originate from a close relationship. They show us a side of reality to which the unauthorised have no access, and are made cautiously and without betrayal. It does not come as a surprise when one learns that it is not just people in a village somewhere, but the inhabitants of Rokytnik, the village in which Hanzlová grew up. From 1990 onwards, the artist, who has lived in Essen since 1983, has returned to her place of birth many times in order to “look people and things in the eye” and also, indirectly, to gaze into the mirror of her own biography. Hanzlová has brought to the work the cool, structural gaze of an insider who had to leave and whose home now seems like a distant land. The many details show an impoverished slum, but never a “grey” world. It is true that the colours are a little faded, but they bear witness to the long staying power of small satisfactions, like a fairy tale in some way, entranced but never idealised as they would be in a nostalgic “heimat” (homeland) idyll.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)