When the Landscape Walks Back

Karolína Netolická in Prague, Soft Pastel on Canvas

Legs appear first. In tights printed with spots or paisley, in bare pink or flat orange, they hang from branches, cross in mid-air or stand in leaf litter, while the bodies they belong to are mostly cut away.

Around them a dark forest holds balloons, bubbles and plastic bags the way an orchard holds fruit.

The scale makes this physical. Karolína Netolická works on canvases that run to several metres and rubs dry pastel in with her fingers, so the surface keeps a record of touch.

The figures read as part tree, part person, part product, and none of them seems to notice what surrounds them.

Risk rarely arrives as an event. In these paintings it settles in slowly, as one more soft surface among the others.

The argument is made in the gaps between things that should not touch.

Netolická describes a dialogue between human and nature that has collapsed into monologue, and she tests it with the leftovers of overproduction: balloons, bags, tights.

In Collectors, hooded figures in white jackets bend over a night lawn and drag cloths heavy with balloons, as if bringing in a harvest nobody planted.

The hoods erase faces, yet the exhibition text at Nová Síň notes that the figures in this series are modelled on the artist's own body, photographed on a phone.

Walkers carries the same unease into a wood. A figure in a red coat steps between pigeons, another in blue leans into a trunk, and a pigeon perches on each hood where a face would be.

Her statement speaks of a woman as heroic wanderer through places she knows, and here the wanderer seems to have been replaced by a flock.

Darkness works as method rather than backdrop. She builds from details toward larger wholes, then shrouds them in black that she treats as a space where light might still arrive.

Born in Prague in 1993, Netolická studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there from 2016 to 2022, in the drawing studio, and won first place at the Critics Award for Young Painters in 2022.

That training seems visible in the line, which stays patient at every scale. Six large canvases were shown together at Nová Síň in 2025, the year of Green Tears at LiTE-HAUS in Berlin.

This month her work is part of Harmony of Chaos at Künstlerhaus Sootbörn in Hamburg, on view until 25 October. She names Ulrich Beck, Byung-Chul Han and Donna Haraway among her readings.

In most of these canvases the light comes from an inflated thing, a balloon or a bubble, and it stays unclear whether it is rescue or residue.