Karolína Šulcová (b.1997) garnered the attention of the professional public in 2023 when she won second place in the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting, at which time she presented her more traditionally conceived landscape paintings. However, her diploma collection, with which she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague last year, had a somewhat different character, more detached from reality. It’s this type of recent work that she’s now exhibiting in Cheb, a pictorial world determined by two principal elements that are different, even contradictory in nature. The first is the iconography of the home, the second is a subtle yet distinct surrealist accent. Sometimes they appear separately, but at other times the artist blends them in an intriguing way, and this is what gives her paintings their unique character. Šulcová associates the theme of the home with one specific place in the Vysočina region, a country house where she has family roots and to which she still returns today. However, she paints this home from memory, which allows her to go “beyond reality”, capturing it in such a way that it seems almost unreal. Although we find specific realities that carry over from image to image, the primary focus is on the essence of the place, its atmosphere, what it means to her. Reality intertwines with memory and imagination, taking on an almost magical, dreamlike dimension.