The first lines of a wall-sized poem at the entrance of Katarina Janečková Walshe’s exhibition Host at The Contemporary Austin are a potent plea for change: “I am the Mother of the World, / I could make it grow, / I could make it turn slow / I could make it just / I could make it last.” The words are scrawled over a painted nude female figure whose dark eyes look out at the viewer, beseeching us to imagine what our world would look like if a compassionate mother mindset prevailed.
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “Bearing Witness,” 2024, acrylic, ink, pigments, and oil stick on canvas, 204 x 69 inches. Artwork and image courtesy the artist
Nearby, the same woman lays across the floor as a larger-than-life papier-mâché sculpture resting on a pile of river rocks. Tears drip down the figure’s nose as her earth-colored hand grips a drawing of a crying pregnant woman holding a toddler. The lower half of the sculpture opens into a snug cavity that is just big enough for a young child to shelter in. Its interior is adorned with several small handprints, joyful signs of life that simultaneously evoke ancient cave painting and an improvised play space. These are joined by a sketch of a nude woman and more text reading “WHAT IS IMPORTANT.”
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “Home,” 2024
Home (all works in the exhibition are from 2024) — Janečková Walshe’s first work in sculpture — inevitably recalls Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1966 installation HON – en katedral (SHE – a cathedral) at the Moderna Museet in Sweden, where visitors were invited to enter a giant, rainbow-colored sculpture of a female figure through her vaginal opening. Like Saint Phalle, Janečková Walshe confronts pressing issues around women’s bodies, sexuality, and motherhood through defiant depictions of the female body itself, confronting great local and global strife through exuberant figuration. Since becoming a mother, Janečková Walshe also incorporates the participation of her two- and five-year-old daughters.
In fact, the artist emphatically shares her studio and process with her children. Each of her paintings begins on the floor, where the blank canvas picks up stray footprints, handprints, writings, and drawings. Through this accumulation of accidental and intentional marks, Janečková Walshe’s daughters tenderly prime the piece for the artist’s eventual images, which often portray intimate scenes between mother and children. In this way, Janečková Walshe empowers and collaborates with her daughters, giving them an active and essential hand in the creation of her work.
But collaboration does not end there: place is also a key protagonist in the artist’s work. Originally from Bratislava, Slovakia, she moved to Corpus Christi ten years ago. In an interview with exhibition curator Robin K. Williams, Janečková Walshe describes her home as “a bit in the middle of nowhere,” explaining that “You can really feel the elements” where she now lives and works. That connection to the earth appears throughout Host, where leaves, flowers, grass, and bits of dirt fleck the thickly impastoed paintings as if they have blown in and dried there by chance. The integration of these natural accidents — along with her children’s spontaneous interventions — conveys an artist who embraces the unexpected with a sense of eager acceptance. It is a trait that could characterize an especially responsive artist as much as a uniquely caring mother.
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “To see us connected.” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Artwork and image courtesy the artist
Nature does not just stay on the surface of Janečková Walshe’s paintings, though. Lakes and waves fill the paintings To see us connected and Paths to Mother, Paths to the Mother, and in Adaptation — a piece that completely covers the gallery’s back wall — volcanoes spew ash and lava above a lapis-colored river that cuts through a bed of boulders and rocks. The harshness of the scene reminds us of today’s onslaught of natural disasters sparked by climate change. But here, nature’s power does not destroy the women below; they continue to protect and provide for the two children in their company.
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “Adaptation,” 2024, acrylic, ink, pigments, and oil stick on canvas, 112 x 196 inches. Artwork and image courtesy the artist
Here and in other works, the figures all look like the artist. Janečková Walshe shows herself as a resilient survivor and caretaker attuned to the Earth, as natural as she is nurturing. She embodies a mythical, elemental archetype who is part god and part animal, a modern take on the woman as an ancient emblem of strength, abundance, and life. The central figure in Adaptation — a captivating self-portrait painted in turbulent, swirling strokes — evokes a prehistoric fertility talisman as much as a Capitoline she-wolf, while the little girl riding on her back conjures a Christ child from a Renaissance painting. These layered references pull us back and forward in time.
There is a huge amount of energy in Janečková Walshe’s work. Her searing colors and nimble brushstrokes are charged and instinctual, yet purposeful. The generous scale she employs in this, her first solo museum presentation, suits the gravity and reach of her concerns, making us wish that she had even more of the museum space to work with. As the exhibition’s opening poem suggests, the artist is broaching huge and heavy territory. Through it all, she moves gracefully between personal specificity and universal sentiment, ultimately offering us a compelling argument for motherly care as a balm for our world’s current chaos.
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “Home,” (detail)
Katarina Janečková Walshe, “Home,” (detail)
Janečková Walshe’s work recalls the brilliant Charlotte Salomon, who also painted and wrote with heartbreaking urgency in the face of an ever-darkening world. In the midst of wars, political divisions, and climate threats, Host does not despair. Tucked away on the back of Home, there is a small drawing. Janečková Walshe drew the three women in the picture, but it appears that one of her daughters painted the rainbow that encircles like a protective forcefield. In this small gesture, the next generation brings a sign of hope.
HOST: Katarina Janečková Walshe is on view at The Contemporary Austin through December 8, 2024.
