About

Colours have always fascinated me — both looking at them and working with them directly. They hold a power that is hard to describe, and it keeps drawing me back to paint again and again, each time discovering a little more in them.

I put the energy and mood of the moment into my paintings. When I look at them later, I remember what I was going through at the time. They become a rather intimate diary of emotions. Public, and yet only mine.

Pure emotions transformed into colours

Tereza Kotek was born in 1983 in Bohemia. She spent her childhood and part of her youth in Denmark and studied English at the university in Ústí nad Labem.

Despite the distinctiveness and authenticity of her style, she has no formal art training and is a self-taught painter. She works on large-format canvases, combining acrylic paints with oil pastels. Delicate brushstrokes next to bold palette-knife marks and a daring use of colour give her paintings an urgency that is hard to escape.

Birds, animals and botanical motifs make up a large part of her work, alongside portraits of women whose vividness is almost unsettling. Although she depicts concrete, clearly recognisable subjects, partial abstraction gives them a sense of not quite belonging to our world.

She lives and works in Slaný near Prague.

All exhibitions