The work of Klaudie Hlavatá (b. 1992), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, impresses not only with her personal approach and strong themes containing a symbolic overlap, but also with her exceptional technique. Hlavatá’s works are based on collage, but those collages are accompanied by drawing and painting. She also works with plexiglass, which often forms the support structure for her pieces. Thanks to this, she can enlarge the format — in some cases, to over two metres — by taking advantage of the material’s transparency, or through the use of harsh lighting, creating a play of shadows that gives the work a third dimension. Her figurative compositions can be thought of as psychological projections, mental maps, fragmentary images, or a strange combination of the inner landscape of the mind and body. If the layering of individual techniques dynamises the work’s form, the contents are similarly layered. These mostly touch-on corporeality and the awareness of one’s own bodily existence through time, both in the present and back to the formative years. In the second layer, Hlavatá opens up themes such as memories, childhood, traumatic experiences, illness, and pain.