On Wednesday, September 17, 2025, at 5:00 PM, the vernissage of my exhibition Whispers of Flowers took place in the beautiful setting of the Josef Liesler Gallery in Kadaň. The gallery is located on the ground floor of the historic town hall at Mírové Square and, since 1996, has hosted regular exhibitions of both contemporary and classical art.
I was truly delighted to see how many visitors came – friends, familiar faces, as well as people who were seeing my work for the first time. In addition to the paintings themselves, the installation also included a projection in which my artworks were gently animated with the help of AI. The floral motifs thus gained a digital dimension, offering visitors the chance to experience painting from an entirely new perspective.
The exhibition Whispers of Flowers at the Josef Liesler Gallery is open until November 2, 2025. If you are nearby, I warmly invite you to visit in person.
For now, I would like to share photographs that capture both the atmosphere of the opening and the unique gallery space, along with the curatorial text written by Mgr. et MgA. Zdeňka Bílková.
Simona Vojtěšková / Whispers of Flowers
September 18 – November 2, 2025
Text courtesy of the Josef Liesler Gallery
Author: Mgr. et MgA. Zdeňka Bílková
The exhibition of Simona Vojtěšková invites us into a world where nature, colors, and memories intertwine with personal imagination. On her canvases and tapestries, flowers appear – not as botanically precise records, but as abstractions, simplifications, sometimes only hinted at by a patch of color. And yet, we still recognize them.
Here we can see a parallel with phenomenological reduction: the artist sets aside all that is superfluous, leaving only the essential. A blot that is still a flower. A color that carries the essence of form. This process of reduction never results in impoverishment – on the contrary, it opens the way to an intense experience, to an image that works directly on our perception.
In this, Vojtěšková follows the tradition of modern painters fascinated by children’s drawings. In both children’s art and her own, we find unpretentious joy, playfulness, and the courage to abandon description in favor of pure gesture. Her work moves on the edge between abstract expressionism and naïve art, but it is always characterized by a refined sense of color: harmony and contrast, relationships of shades meeting side by side on the canvas, the overall mood and atmosphere of the painting. Her sensitivity to color is truly exceptional.
Her creative process is intuitive. She approaches the canvas with an idea, but then lets herself be absorbed by the act of painting itself. Sometimes a few quick strokes are enough; at other times she lingers for hours over a single detail. She paints in layers – beginning with an underpainting, which she may later cover, transform, or bring forward again. This gives her works both depth and a certain dynamic of change.
At first glance, Simona Vojtěšková’s paintings may seem like harmoniously colored, visually pleasant compositions. But beneath this harmony lies tension: somewhere between the specific and the universal, between the flower and the blot, between the recognizable and the unnamed. What at first seems to be “just a beautiful painting” gradually transforms into a space for contemplation, for seeking meaning, and for lived experience.
Does beauty have a place in contemporary art? Can a painting be “only” beautiful? I believe so, and in fact, it is refreshing: at a time when art is so often expected to address pressing social or existential questions, beauty can itself be a radical gesture.
The paintings of Simona Vojtěšková give the viewer freedom. A work of art can, but does not have to be, merely an object to look at – it can be understood as a space where the viewer’s perception meets the painter’s gesture. What at first seems like a decorative motif gradually becomes a place of quiet resonance – between what is visible and what remains unspoken. And it is in this openness that the strength of her work lies.
Photographs by: Jirka Hub, Petr Kozelek, Jiří Vojtěšek
