ANIMA-L
26.6. 2025 - 28. 9. 2025
Renata Cziroková's (* 1992) work is not tied to a single medium. Once she has mastered the language of a particular visual medium, she moves on to the next. Once she understands one form, she discovers a new one. For the artist, the creative principle is the process itself.
Her approach clearly reflects an act of inner cleansing, cyclical release, and acceptance. Her work is a diary of inner growth and maturation. A being on a journey. Cziroková is a lifelong pilgrim. She travels through countries and levels of consciousness. Her journeys are not only geographical, but above all inner. Her work reflects impressions of llandscapes – both external and those born within. She finds inspiration in places where the past mixes with the present, culture with nature, human behavior with animal wisdom. She does not refute the established intellectual construct of anthropocentrism, but poetically circumvents it. Similarly, a strong archetypal level appears in her work – women as bearers of transformation, animals as guides through the unconscious, motherhood as an act of initiation. In a painting where a naked woman breastfeeds a pig and a calm cow sits next to them, the boundaries between species are blurred. The seemingly absurd scene, however, humbly and sensitively presents a form of hierarchy that is nowhere to be found in images of today's reality. It presents harmony, unconditional care, and mutual respect. Cziroková does not create free-thinking ideals, but ethically reevaluates the parameters of an anthropocentric world. The motifs of purification, ethics, and moral principles in her work are not moralizing, but rather a return to something original, raw. To respect. To balance. To inner silence that demands to be heard. And today more than ever.
Cziroková's paintings are rituals. They are not intended for decoration, but for immersion. For transformation. They are a gateway to a space in which the painter is reflected—not as an author, but as one who listens. Her paintings are a special kind of premonition and manifestation—as Cziroková herself says, they often capture situations that are yet to happen. Painting thus becomes a prophetic tool, a mirror of parallel realities, often ones that the author herself only understands in retrospect.
The raven occupies a special place in her symbolic vocabulary – a black bird that is not just a creature, but a guide. In mythology, the raven is often the guardian of the gates between worlds; in Native American legends, the raven is sometimes the bearer of prophecy, sometimes a deceiver – but in both cases a guide to hidden truths. In Norse tradition, it sits on the shoulder of the god Odin; in Celtic tradition, it is associated with the goddess of war and death, Morrigan; in Native American cultures, it is often the bringer of light into darkness. In her paintings, the raven does not signify death, but transition. A sign that something is happening beyond the veil of ordinary vision.
Cziroková's paintings are contemplative moments of beings in an unspoken space-time. In each one, the principle of movement is present – from one place to another, from one being to another, from the past
to the present. But what if everything has already happened and life stretches this realization into linearity, into the subsequent experience of what has already happened?
The resonance of the author's world is also connected with that of Carlos Castaneda. His teachings—through the character of the shaman Don Juan—touch on principles such as the path of the warrior, intentions, and dreaming. Castaneda's world is not a metaphor. It is a reality that lies hidden beneath the ordinary one, but most people never see it. Words are just words; explanations are just explanations; the only way to learn is to do. And it is precisely this hands-on approach that is key. True knowledge comes through direct experience and action. This idea is in harmony with the author – her gesture, composition, choice of symbols. There is no room for chance in her painting gesture – everything is a choice, everything is an imprint of intuition and conscious attention.
Time and space in the author's conception are not linear. They are like a condensed knot that gradually unravels in life. What we experience has already happened long ago—only our bodies, our senses, our stories have yet to pass through this form of realization. Her paintings are a record of what lies beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception—as if through them one could glimpse behind the scenes of objectified reality. This principle permeates her work like an invisible skeleton – everything has its pattern, but there is no need to understand it, just to open up to it. Nothing has to be final. The motif of such questioning is also carried by the portrait of a woman's face surrounded by bones. Bones as artifacts symbolizing the remnants of life, death. Pelvic bones, which are also the support for the birth of new life. This paradox, where bone is a symbol of both life and death, is the most powerful theme the artist could have captured in her painting. A theme that is supreme because its very ambivalence touches on the very essence of being.
Renata Cziroková (* 1992) was born in Napajedla, where she also lives and works. She graduated from Jiří Petrbok's drawing studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
author of the text: Bára Alex Kašparová
The exhibition is taking place at Dům Radost, nám. W. Churchilla 2, Prague 3.
Link to the FB event.