Eva Kotatkova

Eva Kotatkova’s large-scale installations explore how social structures such as community, family, and institutions relate to individual experiences and the creative process. Her immersive environments, built from diverse imagery drawn from historical and contemporary culture, resemble magnified cabinets of curiosity or tangible dreamscapes. For her celebrated installation Asylum (2013), presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Kotatkova explored how institutions organize and archive their activities, and how these systems affect the individuals involved. She layered images and objects, which were suggestive of cages, walls, blindness, and secrecy, to create a dense psychological topography related to confinement. Kotatkova’s small-scale collages and sculptures fuse portraits of unidentified people and images of the human body with everyday objects, creating surreal hybrids.