Vase with Girl

70% of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor Family.

Laura Limbourg (1996) is a young painter who specializes in figurative work, for which she won the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting in 2020. Her works are distinguished by a bold expressive shorthand and translucency, with the paints on the canvases creating a characteristic blurring effect. This style requires a quick and spontaneous technique in which the paint is applied directly to an unprimed canvas, where it soaks in but cannot be allowed to dry before the work is finished. A few years ago Limbourg and her paintings made a significant contribution to the artistic discussion about the sexual exploitation and abuse of women. Her work was influenced by a stay in Southeast Asia, where she was confronted with the phenomenon of overt sex tourism. She began processing this shocking experience on large canvases, where she combined traditional Asian symbols, exotic landscapes, and visual elements of advertising and kitsch. More recently a lighter tennis theme has appeared in her paintings, but with its formal force and often subversive absurdity, it remains equally as powerful as her more engaged works. Limbourg also paints vases made of concrete or Acrystal, and in addition to painting actual vases she also creates paintings of painted vases; these are not understood as studies for vases but rather as independent painterly works. The painting offered in this auction is just such a depiction of a painted vase, featuring characteristic motifs of an exotic landscape, women, and tigers in the role of protectors of the female tribe. In this work Limbourg used her distinctive new technique for capturing the glow emanating from behind the subject, a method she is continuing to refine.