Silence Falls presents a new series of paintings by Nikola Kopp Lourková in which silence becomes a place for concentration and gentle observation. The artist lets ordinary objects – chairs, apples, dishes, pins or parts of the body – emerge from soft, layered colours like memories rooted in personal experience. The motifs are more hinted at than depicted literally, as if slowly emerging from a hazy background. Kopp Lourková works with a delicate palette of pink, ochre and flesh tones, complemented by the use of more distinctive colour accents and subtly interrupted lines. In these paintings, silence is not emptiness but attention – a moment when the world shows itself in details that otherwise elude us.
In her earlier cycles, Kopp Lourková focused on the themes of fear and tension, but this recent series is significantly more relaxed, with the artist turning to painting understood as a slow, concentrated process. The everyday objects bear traces of touch, time and imperceptible unease – of minor shifts that upset a sense of balance while simultaneously trying to find it again.
At the exhibition, Kopp Lourková’s works are complemented by Jitka Svobodová’s Door and Window (1981). The two artists share an interest in the ordinary and its visual potential: Svobodová through space, light and form; Kopp Lourková through layered colours, transparency and painterly gesture. In this way, the exhibition is a silent encounter between two different approaches to concentrated seeing. Silence Falls is an invitation to stop and look with eyes that, instead of looking for something, let things be – and thus resound anew.
NIKOLA KOPP LOURKOVÁ (b. 1996) is a Czech painter from Hradec Králové. She studied at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, initially under Jiří David and Milan Salák (2016–2020) and subsequently (2020–2022) under Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný. In 2019, she did a study exchange under Josef Bolt at the Academy of Fine Arts, and also in the Studio of the Visiting Artist under the direction of Justin Fitzpatrick. She mainly works in the medium of painting, which in her latest works she explores through the use of subtle layers of colour, light and the atmosphere of everyday motifs. A co-founder of the Cifra Gallery in the Bohemian Switzerland region, she regularly exhibits in the Czech Republic and abroad and her works can be found in numerous collections at home and abroad as well.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.
