Eva Koťátková

Eva Koťátková was born in Prague in 1982, where she currently lives and works. 

Eva Koťátková practice brings together sculptures, objects, collages, costumes, and texts in large-scale, colorful installations. Her work explores the influence of the social environment on our personal lives, often through structures and objects that constrain the body while also offering the possibility of transforming it. Inspired by surrealist poetry, theatrical mechanisms, psychoanalysis, and forms of experimental education, her practice has a strong relationship to storytelling. Her narratives are fragmented and scattered like clues to be deciphered, evoking dreams and the unconscious as powerful sources of creative force. 

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Koťátková conducted research into François Rabelais’s novel Gargantua (1534), in which the author evokes his character’s childhood while criticizing the educational methods of his time. In the surroundings of Saché, Koťátková collected objects related to education and everyday life that were familiar and easily recognizable. Yet their arrangement within her installations remained mysterious. Their classification seemed to follow a free association of ideas, creating a path that invited viewers to reconstruct the connections between them.