Mia Camera
MIA CAMERA - MY PRISON
Ivana Lomová's exhibition at the Špála Gallery consists of three parts and presents her latest series of paintings.
In the basement, paintings inspired by scenes from films emerge from the darkness. These are the interiors of rooms in which there are no open doors to the outside world anywhere, the windows are also closed. Ivana Lomová paints a locked, inward-looking space, interiors in which time seems to have stopped, a strange calm and silence permeates everything. But it is only an apparent calm. The films she has chosen for her paintings, perhaps unconsciously, are united by the theme of very strong female heroines. Often abandoned, desperate and lonely, often committing suicide in order to escape a life in which they feel like a prison cell.
Some paintings have captions that bring a voice to the silent images, creating an interesting contrast. Subtitles written in different languages suggest that human emotions, sorrows and joys, despair and hope are something that unites us wherever we live and whatever language we speak.
MIA CAMERA - MY ROOM
On the ground floor of the gallery we can enter the artist's childhood room. Ivana Lomová does not return to childhood through toys like Petr Nikl, nor does she process anxious states like Josef Bolf, but enters childhood through the most ordinary objects. Through a poor faded flower, a window, a lamp, curtains or a tablecloth. And he paints these objects as closely, carefully and intently as if a small child who finds himself alone in a room were looking at them intently and curiously.
MIA CAMERA - MY CAMERA
The paintings on the first floor could be included in a long series of the artist's works depicting Prague. During the pandemic of the epidemic, Ivana Lomová photographed and subsequently painted her hometown, but in a completely different way than before. She focused on the scratched walls and plaster of the houses, whose surface, masterfully rendered, looks like a visual delicacy that could satisfy the viewer on its own. But there is a more serious message in them.
Ivana Lomová's camera has captured walls and walls through which we cannot see the sky, they become a kind of barrier behind which we are trapped. In some of the paintings we suspect that behind the wall there is a beautiful garden or park, but there is no open door (just like in film interiors) through which we can pass. Thus, the paintings may reflect feelings associated with isolation and loneliness during a pandemic situation, but also a sense of confinement that refers to the existential fate of man. This is what connects the paintings on the gallery floor with those on the ground floor and in the basement.
In her latest paintings, Ivana Lomová talks about sadness, nostalgia, feelings of being trapped and lonely, feelings that people share across the world. Perhaps that is why the paintings in Mia Camera speak to us in such an intimate tone.
Máša Pivovarová
