Petra Brázdilová

Chronicle of Architectural Culture of a Small Village
Pragovka Gallery, Prague, 2018

The serie of paintings by Petra Brázdilová deals with the heritage of architecture during the normalisation in her native town Bystřička in Wallachia. The author as a local chronicler / interpretor is tasked with a rather ambitious and consciously unrealistic goal, mapping and capturing images of all the buildings located on the territory of the village, especially the local evergreens - Firemen, Sokol, Municipality, local boutiques, atc.

As the author adds, "The past aesthetics of these unattractive buildings appeals with its ambiguity: by its uniqueness and ignorance of its surroundings, by its incoherent style and in the same time by its forced uniformity."

Petra Brázdilová conceives the whole project as a painting task which exceeds the project-research background of the whole work using the suggestive and refined play with form, theme and her own playful self-reflection. In the end, it is more likely to come to multi-layered statement and artistic form that moves what originally locally specific has shifted into a form which at some way can border with clear fantasy or mutual symbols.

A thoughtful amount of exaggeration, the oscillation between comity and tragedy, and playing with her own identity are all tools of artistic expressions which introduce other themes such as the relation of the center and the periphery, the corrected intent and the unpredictable casualty, personal and mutual, affectionate and sincere, successful and unsuccessful.

Curator: Martin Nytra

Hidden history
manipulated photography, 2015

In this series of small print I was dealing with the relationship to a specific place - the city of Zlín where I started to study art. In contemporary photographs from Zlín I joined myself as the rightful member to form the status the city of Zlín, e.g. as a wife of a native of Zlín, an ethnographer František Bartoš, who was a significant Moravian personality education and culture of the second half of the 19th century. Elsewhere I am unexpectedly discovering as the main designer of Zlín urbanism, somewhere like a dumb witness bombed Zlin behind the German occupation or as a debater at the Baťa conference.

The Lifelong Work of Mr.Z.
digital prints, 2012

In this project I strive to make visible my father’s lifelong effort to repair our familial house. He always makes complete documentation his every single work. Father’s strictly technical images makes me to add simplified and kind of foolish comment from my point of view as a layman.

Situations
digital prints, 2012

By mostly unnecessary objects and family images I adapt themes and mix events of my childhood and untill recently as well. Basically I have proceed from forget situations and I try to create a tension between theirs inaccessibilities (take pictures from bird’s eye view) and raising, however I intentionally repress them as well.