Nightfall

Laura Limbourg is a young artist who specializes primarily in figurative painting, for which she received the 2020 Critics’ Award for Young Painting. Her works are distinguished by a bold expressive style and the use of translucent paints applied to an unprimed canvas, which gives her painting its characteristic blurring effect. Limbourg’s works often feature exotic motifs, which she juxtaposes with themes of sex tourism, the exploitation of women, and the commercialization of the body. Yet she also works with the imagery of kitsch and advertising as well as lighter genre themes, such as a series of tennis players. However, thanks to their formal strength and often subversive absurdity, these works remain just as powerful as her socially engaged pieces. Limbourg also makes concrete and acrylic resin vases, whose surfaces she covers with either painting or reliefs. She also creates paintings of vases that are not intended as studies for three-dimensional objects but rather as independent works of art. The artist views her vases not as utilitarian objects but as sculptural pieces, sometimes with a striking exaggeration of scale. The vase is a symbol of femininity and fragility, which the artist deliberately contrasts with the hardness of the material used. The object Nightfall explores this tension between delicacy and strength. The surface of the vase is covered with a relief depicting a girl on horseback and a tiger, which can be interpreted as her protector. The figure of the girl, whose back is turned to the viewer, evokes the motif of a journey, a departure, or an inner transformation. The work as a whole is built on the contrast between vulnerability and strength, protection and freedom, fragility and resilience—that is, on the tension that is a defining feature of the artist’s work.

99 % of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor family.