It would be impossible to give an account of Veronika Šrek Bromová’s work from the last decade without making reference to her colorful professional and personal life. Her rural surroundings, her family, and her powerful initiation into art therapy training have all wrought changes over the last decade.
The artist’s projects stand at the intersection of initiatory spiritual practices, non-European cultures, and living art. The social, collective dimension of the artist’s actions offsets her ongoing work with photography, drawing, and painting.
Bromová was shaped by the environment of UMPRUM and later by the unfettered energy of the 1990s. However, even before that, the artist’s fundamental influence was her parents, as she often mentions in interviews, even though she was already attempting to set herself apart from their labor-intensive techniques during the time of her studies. Parallels to the imaginative, magical quality typical of Dagmar and Pavel Brom’s photomontages can be found even in their daughter’s current work.
Homestead Chaos, where the artist runs the small gallery Kabinet Chaos and hosts summer workshops and other social and cultural activities, represents a new stage in her approach to art, to herself, and to the social sphere. Several years ago, the artist’s line of performativity underwent a shift. She eclectically makes use of ritual, symbolic, and magical elements from various cultures, oscillating between the figure of the seer, the mage, the shaman, the healer, the gardener, and the (neo)peasant. In these and other hybrid roles, she performs with an emphasis on interpersonal contact and the relationship with nature.
Bromová is often associated with the transformation of the perception of female identity in the art of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe. She is interested in women’s sexualized position in society. In her ritualized performances of recent years, on the other hand, she emphasizes the archetypal healing power of femininity, fertility, relationships, and collectivity. These live performances contrast in their universality with her earlier “self-performances,” which were recorded photographically. Recall, for example, the notorious self-performance Zemzoo (1998), which she presented at the Venice Biennale.
Bromová, who was in the vanguard during the advent of digital technologies, today often trades the sophistication of the manipulated image for physical presentness and favors handcrafted techniques. One can also view her recent automatic drawings, paintings, and objects from this liberating perspective. Her work continues to retain an autobiographical quality, almost literally, as a direct record through which the artist visualizes her life using various artistic media. For example, the artist created Veromandala (2016) by making prints using her own naked body.
Bromová is an influential figure in the Czech scene as both an artist and a teacher. Her work manages to emotionally interconnect the seemingly contradictory attributes of the progressive, globalized world and the timeless universe of archaic mythologies, injecting dynamism and beneficence into the relationship between the urban and the rural. In her parallel photographic work, the artist focuses predominantly on her loved ones. She bestows an organic dimension to themes such as family, the blurring of gender, and the interweaving of the human and natural worlds.
Mariana Serranová
M.A. Veronika Šrek Bromová
*1966 in Prague
She lives and works at the homestead Chaos in Střítež u Poličky as well as in Prague.
Czech intermedia artist Veronika Šrek Bromová was born in 1966 in Prague. She has exhibited in many places in Europe, Russia, the US, and Asia. In 1999, she became the first woman to represent the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale. Her works can be found in major public collections around the Czech Republic and Europe (the National Gallery in Prague, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, mumok in Vienna). From 2001 to 2011 she was the head of New Media Studio II, The Photographic and Digital Image at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She enriched the new art scene with bold experiments using new technologies, without shame or compromise and with a deeply personal and intimate artistic expression. The core of her work consists in women’s themes, the body, gender, family, alternative family, nature, and mythology, and in the last decade she has been developing her own manner of ritual—performances. She finds inspiration in the traditions of Indigenous peoples and cultures. For twelve years she has lived with her family on a homestead called Chaos in eastern Bohemia, 180 kilometers from Prague and 70 from Brno. She strives to live in harmony with nature and organizes the program for the gallery Kabinet Chaos, which focuses on professional art and artists who work with humanistic and natural themes. Since 2015 she has been a lecturer at Anglo-American University, and she actively collaborates with other institutions such as Artedu, CIEE, World Learning, University of West Bohemia Faculty of Design and Art, Masaryk University in Brno, Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, and FaVU in Brno. She studied art therapy at the Czech Association for Art Therapy, where after five years of study she received an ArteSur certificate in psychotherapeutic training.
