Eliška Bartek
And a whole life ahead of me
Cliché Verre and photograms

31 October – 5 December 2026

OPENING: 30 October 7.00 pm with Eliška Bartek

READING as part of the TDKT: 1 November, 4.00 pm
Eliška Bartek reads from her autofictional novel ‘And a whole life ahead of me.’ Followed by a discussion about her life as an artist and her photographic work with Kristin Dittrich / Shift School for Photography in Dresden and Vienna and Annette Nickel / Fotoforum Dresden.

Eliška Bartek, photographer, painter and author, was born in Nový Jičín in 1950 and grew up in Prague. She is regarded as one of the most significant Czech female artists of her generation. After successfully fleeing to the West in 1972 under dramatic circumstances, she acquired Swiss citizenship in 1975. Since 1997, Eliška Bartek has lived and worked in Ticino and Berlin. In her art, she combines personal memories with poetic visual worlds and reflects on questions of identity, origin and transience.

Photograms – Light, Material and Time
As poetic traces of light, material and time, they are created directly on the image support without the use of a camera. They combine experimental abstraction with a distinct physical presence and allow the viewer to experience photography as an immediate process of visualisation. Some works are stylistically linked to the historical photograms of the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s.

Cliché verre – between photography and drawing
As a painter, Eliška Bartek utilises the possibilities of this light drawing in a decidedly painterly manner. Her photographic images appear like black-and-white negatives of paintings, whose colours elude the eye in a mysterious way.

A life between art and literature
Alongside her work in photography and painting, Eliška Bartek is also active as a writer. In March 2024, her debut novel *Und vor mir ein ganzes Leben* was published by Weissbooks Verlag. In it, she tells an extraordinary life story.
Just how much of it actually stems from her own life and where the fiction begins is something we will explore at the Photography Salon as part of the Czech-German Cultural Days.