NEWS

The faces of the festival in recent years have been actors Stefanie Reinsperger, Miloslav König, Stanislav Majer, Lucie Trmíková and the writer Stefan Kaegi, or rather his „robotic alter ego“. The urging typographic design of last year's Flora, exposing the leitmotif of New World 2.022, was influenced by the lingering covid pandemic and especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine…

„Although Ondra Hruška has created striking and powerful portraits in the past, we have the impression that currently the promotional materials of Czech theatres are oversaturated with stylized portrait photographs. In line with the annual motto OTHERNESS and the emphasis on female authors, this time we wanted to create an atypical visual, which is why Radim Měsíc and I approached the painter Adéla Janská,“ says Petr Nerušil, the director of 26DF, describing the genesis of the graphic design.

The Olomouc artist has given her generous permission to Flora to use her paintings, and the festival will thus take place under the supervision of androgynous women with porcelain skin and expressive, almost theatrical make-up…

Radim Měsíc's „graphic play“ with the revealed craft of digital post-production aims to enhance the „essence of otherness“ that radiates from Adéla's disturbing portraits and communicates with Flora's dramaturgical intentions.

„The challenge was to come up with a suitable expressive principle that would build on the – already visually expressive – portraits of Adéla Janská. Instead of the traditional ‚framing‘ of the paintings with graphic elements in post-production, we chose a different, more invasive way that accentuates the clash of both media,“ says graphic designer Radim Měsíc. According to him, the polarity of the digital and analogue worlds is underlined by the exposed layers of Photoshop and the exposed „strokes“ of the individual tools of the graphics program.

The Olomouc figurative painter Adéla Janská has recently made a significant impact on the Czech, but especially international scene – she has exhibited in London, Atlanta, Vienna and New York. „Adéla Janská's Brides are a revelation,“ says gallery owner David Voda, whose Rub Gallery in Olomouc hosted her last Czech exhibition last year. „Janská puts them (the brides) in the silence of her studio, which is at the same time a dressing room, make-up room and boudoir, in front of a large-format dressing table of a painter's canvas and depicts them with an almost photographic coolness. Then she smudges their make-up with cabaret shrewdness.“

New York curator Jeffrey Uslip speaks of the audacity with which a painter on the verge of maturity dares to „paint like a twenty-something.“

We are extremely honoured to present the work of Adéla Janská to a wider audience within the Flora Theatre Festival.

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Adéla Janská (*1981) is one of the artists who emerged on the Czech art scene without having been trained in conventional art centres. Born in Olomouc, the artist studied in Slovakia (Bánská Bystrica) before returning to Olomouc. She graduated from the art college in 2009 but exhibited for the first time in 2013 (in Rýmařov). In the shadow of the art metropolises, if we can speak of them in this way in our context, she has nevertheless grown up as a distinctive painter with a unique world of content and a convincing painterly expression. The figurative painter with a sense of colour manages to update the traditional format of the painting and fill it with the atmosphere of the present (…).

- Petr Vaňous, Press release for the exhibition Deconstruction of Presence at Vyšehrad Gallery in Prague