“Skin Care,” Kateřina Vincourová’s current exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, features recent works along with new site-specific installations. As the Czech artist explains, “I build ‘cages’ and try to capture echoes of my thoughts in them.” The ambiguous exhibition title intimates a closeness to the body, as well as fragility, vulnerability, and everyday life. These themes, as well as questions of connection and separation, frequently appear in Vincourová’s sculptures and installations, which employ ordinary materials, as noted in the Rudolfinum’s press release, to “evok[e] surface and depth, exposure and protection.”
Robert Preece: Could you explain the dramatic and rather mysterious Medusa (2018)?
Kateřina Vincourová: Medusa and her sisters are often depicted—I even found them in the frescoes in one of the Rudolfinum’s halls. My Medusa looks partly like a discarded monstrance. Instead of a face, a white field shines out like a projection screen, offering space for our own projections as we confront her story. I think of her as one of those women punished for their beauty and innocence. Poseidon assaulted her in Athena’s temple, where she fled seeking help, but Athena cursed Medusa, and she became a fearsome Gorgon like her sisters, with snakes for hair. Any mortal who looked into her eyes turned to stone. I relate this myth to violence and injustice against women, past and present.
RP: I really like how the room with Medusa looks into the room where Molecules (2006/2025) is installed, and how that view plays off the curved, painted ceiling. How did you approach the selection and juxtaposition of forms and the arrangement of works in the space?
KV: The whole exhibition grows from the architecture of the space, which was originally conceived as a picture gallery. I didn’t want to change the architecture; my wish was that visitors would drift from one landscape to the next, the works flowing by, washing past them like water. Circling has no beginning and no end. In my practice, the space is part of the work. I carry on that dialogue with the space first within myself. The plan only becomes final on site, where I let the site-specific installation take shape. Here, I allowed an earlier version of Molecule (shown in “Bittersweet Transformation—Alina Szapocznikow, Kateřina Vincourová and Camille Henrot,” Kunsthalle Graz, 2016) to grow and blossom; it became the seed or basic building pattern of the new work, Molecules.
RP: With Her (2016/2025) is installed in the center of another room, surrounded by All Yesterday (2025), which consists of ragged drywall sheets leaning against the walls. Is With Her partly autobiographical, or are you referring to a kind of spirit in the abstract?
KV: With Her—a woman lying curled up on the ground—first took shape in my studio as an immediate response to loneliness. I built her from cardboard boxes and a moving blanket that happened to be there. This companion is also my alter ego. She travels with me from show to show, and her role changes. Here, her body is made of gutted computers; looking through the holes in the blanket, we see into her insides. Her situation here is bleak. Lined by the wreckage of a city—broken drywall panels propped against the walls—she stands for what some of us live through and others witness through the eye of online images.
RP: Another view through the doorway brings us to Rain (2005/2025). It’s visual, but it’s like we can hear it. What were you thinking about when making these large drops, which also resemble punching bags?
KV: A landscape where it rains and the sun goes down. The black hanging raindrops read like a path—forward and back. The first hangs body-to-body with the viewer; you can feel like punching them or embracing them. Denisa Kujelová, my friend and the curator of the show, wrote: “Their blackness is like liquid distress.” That distress may be personal, mental, or environmental. But there’s also a symbol of hope: Sunset (2019), a small work on the wall made from a tie hanger with a little silk roundel set behind it in a frame.
RP: What is The Bagrooms (2025) about?
KV: The Bagrooms plays with “backrooms,” the term for unsettling images of desolate backroom spaces that circulate online—empty spaces where stories have just arrived or just left. The inflatable bags become makeshift huts, places to hide or lie down. Drifting without order, these sugar-sweet pillows, set within a period, pseudo-Rudolfine chamber, invite with deceptive charm—up close, their interiors suggest abandoned cells, chapels, or dwellings. I’m thinking of people, even whole nations, who have lost their homes and are on the move.
RP: Three small objects placed in a transitional space all require a careful look. What are Pendelum (2010–11), Planet (2019), and Under the Lamp (2019) about? And why did you decide to install them in this way?
KV: I’ve been speaking about landscapes we pass through; large ones run in parallel with miniature ones. Pendelum, complete with its formula and period, speaks to time’s continual flow while evoking a surreal landscape. Under the Lamp is a scene captured on a porcelain shelf, where the present oscillates with the past through gently confusing historical and contemporary elements. Planet shows an advertising photograph from 1926: a perfect glassware set, a majestic emblem of the image and status of a successful family. Our knowledge of what followed—the fragility, the losses, and yes, the hypocrisy and falsehood of the coming war years—undermines the illusion of stability.
RP: What sorts of things were you thinking about when choosing the materials for Arteries (2010–11/2025)?
KV: Its base material is buttonhole elastic—the kind that let me tighten or loosen my children’s trousers as they grew. I’m drawn to materials with stories. Often, they’re domestic—wooden tool handles, knitting needles—or they’re from the world of haberdashery—buttonhole elastic, zippers—treasures from my mother’s drawer, and now from my drawer.
Arteries evokes a venous network and, at the same time, the structures and systems of relationships—familial, social, political, and ecological. The elastics radiate from a single point into the whole space, and at the center of this flower/organism, on a little shelf, stands a glass of water. It doesn’t take much for this beauty to turn into a bow bristling with arrows and clubs—for something to become nothing.
RP: What are we to make of the hanging, multi-part Silence (2025) in terms of imagery, construction, and form?
KV: Hundreds of faces gaze at us wordlessly, with no possibility of dialogue. They bear no identity—neither gendered nor ethnic—and their forms might just remind us of ancient cultures. Horror and awe arise from pairing close-up “skin” textures with a larger form that flows like an endless data stream looping across a computer monitor. The individual parts are pierced with metal rings that connect them, which heightens the effect. We seem to be faced with a possible future that reflects our longing to humanize AI, alongside our fear of anything that is not human, yet can think.
“Skin Care” is on view at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, through January 4, 2026.