Johana Merta
Student of Václav Stratil’s inermedia studio at Brno’s Arts Faculty, Johana Merta is a painter and visual artist, the signer with the band Hugo a Zoe (Hugo and Zoe), a curator for two Brno galleries – Anne Frank Memorial and Galerie Art, as well as a stage and costume designer and score composer. She was born in 1987 and between 2003 – 2008 attended Jiří Sobotka’s course in exhibition management at Brno’s secondary school of art and design. At the Arts Faculty (FAVU), she first joined the performance studio led by Tomáš Ruller. However, Václav Stratil’s open gallery concept certainly is an ideal environment for this young and active artist who moves freely across the media. In her work she reflects her personal mythology often based on her childhood as well as a religious, particularly Jewish context. She openly and freely uses language or the strategy of symbolic metaphors and sign systems; one of her themes is the exploitation of the Braille system and its codification in planar form. Johana Merta’s exhibition projects in the form of narratively-conceived installations show strong signs of romanticism and a certain link to surrealism as a method, i.e. something which she shares in a certain way with the youngest generation. She does not shun emotions and pathos but her artistic output might also take the form of abstract geometry. The most striking element of Johana Merta’s artistic approach lies in discursive communication which affects her personal subtext as much as – on a general level – art in the post-industrial society.
johanamerta.eu
mertajohana@seznam.cz
Martin Dostál
Everything is Related to Everything Else
Acryl and oil on canvas, 130 x 200 cm; 2011
List of artists participating in MAS "dílna" in 1994–2010
