Upcoming: Stay in Touch by Natálie Pejchová 11.6.2026 - 9.8.2026Curator: Alexandra Karpuchina

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In the space of the contemporary city, fragments of emotions, symbols, and everyday rituals intertwine into a layered landscape of anxiety and a quiet longing for authenticity. Natálie Pejchová’s series of paintings, Stay in Touch, grows out of the fear of being accepted by a society that feels increasingly distant, as well as the dread of expressing one's own opinion, the loss of individuality, or the latently present totalitarianism hidden within the mechanisms of everyday life. Reality in her paintings gradually transforms into an artificial space for the individual navigating between the need for connection and a sense of isolation, between spontaneity and learned behavioral patterns. The entire series is permeated by a post-apocalyptic confusion of emotions, situations, and sensory overload, as well as numbness, dualism, and materialism. This is not meant as a critique of these phenomena, but rather as a reminder of the Platonic worlds in which we move today. False idols and their radicalization appear here, alongside the need for purification and faith understood as an emotional human need for someone seeking connection, meaning, and the possibility of sharing something that remains difficult to name.

The artist’s approach is based on intuition, sensuality, and trust in the creative process itself, which is as important to her as the final work. Painting here is not just an image, but a physical trace of the process and an intuitive record of internal states. Natálie Pejchová works with the layering of signs, structures, and recurring motifs that create an ornamental rhythm reminiscent of the fragmented visual language of the present. She combines oil, wax, textile fragments, embroidery, and her own decorative elements, which she inserts into the canvas as a natural part of the narrative. Organic textiles clash with artificial materials, matte surfaces with glossy ones, and expressive gestures with decorativeness. The paintings thus oscillate between magic and mechanism, intimacy, the need for spiritual reflection, and visual chaos.

Thematically, her work moves between questions of faith, consumerism, collective identity, and spiritual emptiness. She is fascinated by everyday rituals, repetition, and the small mechanisms that shape the subconscious behavior of individuals. She explores how spiritual desire and cultural symbols are transformed in the environment of the contemporary city, how and where contemporary materialism turns into a new spirituality and human emotions into a commodity. At the same time, the paintings are permeated by irony, absurdity, and a fascination with conspiracy aesthetics that resonate with the paranoia of the present.

Stay in Touch captures a society moving between euphoria, panic, fascination, and numbness, between the need for contact and an ever-stronger sense of alienation. In the tension between the material and spiritual worlds, a space is created for uncertainty, intuition, and the search for meaning in a reality constantly shaped by images, media, and social projections.

Natálie Pejchová graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2024 in the Painting II studio under the guidance of Vladimír Skrepl. In the same year, she completed a residency at the Indonesian ISI University in Yogyakarta, which significantly influenced her approach to pictorial symbolism and the spiritual dimension of creation.

Her work is primarily devoted to painting, but her work often extends to the object and conceptual level and aims to constantly redefine the image. She focuses on the emotional topography of the city, fragmented memory and psychological echoes of visual culture. She explores the manipulation of emotions and the relationships between the individual and society, as well as the ways in which urban language, spiritual desire and power structures are reflected in everyday rituals, symbols and subconscious behavior.

Themes of obsessive repetition, coincidence, sacred chaos and self-creation of myths appear in her creative process. She reflects consumer idols, utopian impulses and the desire for transcendence.

Her work has been presented, for example, at the SPZ Gallery as part of a curatorial collaboration with Jiří Ptáček, at the Hidden Gallery and at the group exhibitions Čistý vzduch (Das Liga, Kroměříž), CJCH Intervention #36 (Švihov State Chateau), Domácí hosté (Týn nad Vltavou City Gallery) and at the NTK Gallery.

– Alexandra Karpuchina