Lions

The monumental paintings of Denisa Krausová are full of stories, the richness of the artist's imagination, and inspiration drawn from motifs of nature, everyday experiences, and fantastical events. They are characterized by a unique yet constantly evolving style and various tools for layering and composing individual scenes and pictorial planes – from collage-like techniques and the combination of seemingly disparate aesthetics to inspiration from graphic and sculptural approaches, which Krausová also previously explored. The result is multilayered, often autobiographical scenes, where we push through thickets, blooming flowers, and a plethora of other motifs to individual nooks offering further layers of the narrative. In addition to natural entities, fictitious, mythical, and real figures, animals, and everyday objects appear here in a wild yet clearly ordered game of fantasy.

The painting selected for the 100ks platform captures a group of lions surrounding an abstracted lamb. The artist found inspiration here in historical sculptures at castles and chateaus and their classic shapes and lines, which are dynamized in the painting by a blazing fire, while a strip of collage in the upper part of the image brings us back to a two-dimensional reality. Courage, protection, and untamed spirit meet here in a vividly colored, generous whole.