Karolína Netolická began by wanting to be a mycologist. That early fascination with natural structures, not how they work, but how they look, never fully left, and it quietly shaped a practice that now sits at the intersection of nature, philosophy, and social observation. Working through layered, symbolically dense compositions, Karolína Netolická draws from a triangular set of influences: the natural world, socio-ecological literature, and the texture of everyday personal experience. From this triangle, a distinctive visual language has emerged, decorative yet critical, intimate yet expansive, rooted in the belief that in one star, the entire sky can be seen.

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Art is often chosen as a medium for its freedom. Why do you personally turn to art, rather than another form of expression?

Throughout my life, I have truly discovered that art is my main means of expression, because I did not originally want to be an artist. From about the age of nine to sixteen, I had a huge desire to become a scientist. Specifically, a mycologist. But in high school, I began to realize more that I was more fascinated by how natural structures look than how they work. And I started to attend various art courses focusing on drawing the human body to verify if my interest in art was real. And since then, I started drawing every day and I was thinking about a professional career as an artist. I feel that the artistic language has become my own over the years of artistic activity. It is certainly freer for me than the scientific one, although I think that these two languages intertwine a lot in my work.

What unusual or unexpected sources of inspiration have deeply infl uenced your work?

In my work, I have three points of inspiration that together form a triangle. The first point is nature. The second important point for me is literature with a socio-ecological-philosophical focus (for ex. Byung Chul Han, Ulrich Beck, Erazim Kohak, and Zygmunt Bauman,James Lovelock). And the third important point is my personal inner experiences of everyday situations. These three points form my inspirational triangle. By comparing them, they allow me to better grasp the work and thus take a certain critical stance or dereflection.

List six core themes or messages you aim to convey through your art.

My most important themes include:

✧ The plasticity of contemporary times

✧ Borders and their transgression

✧ Monologization of dialogue

✧ Nomadism in dependence on the loss of face

✧ Women's steps as bearers of silence in fusion with nature

✧ Merging with invisible risks

How does your art engage with or comment on pressing contemporary issues, social, political, or environmental?

In my work, I subtly touch on social and environmental themes. I use euphemistic narrative to symbolic forms to depict certain social phenomena that are also reflected in the environment. This includes, for example, not only the above-mentioned issue of the boundless plastic world, which is filled with exaggerated information, but also the issue of communication through social digital media and its impact on human reciprocity, which is starting to disappear from our world.

In a decorative way, I depict digital tornadoes that sweep through our homes, thus creating transparent ruins from them. In another case, I implanted a so-called revitalization chip into an organism affected by the digital age, which is supposed to cure this being from experiencing only positive emotions, which are to a greater extent toxic for it.

If you could communicate just one core message through your entire body of work, what would it be?

Sharpening our sensitivity to seemingly ordinary events and things around us, because in one star the entire sky can be seen.

Do you feel a personal connection to your subject matter is essential? How has this connection shaped your work?

I think that a personal relationship to my subject is really very important. I would even dare to say that this relationship is the most important for an artist in his work, because in this way the work of art becomes authentic, original and convincing. For me, it is also a certain sensitivity that the artist shares with the viewer, to whom he conveys a certain message that he may or may not accept.

In a special way, he inserts his elements and perceptions into societal themes, and thus these themes come close to him. With his original concepts, he illuminates the themes, lets them show themselves. I let my themes arise, for example, with the help of decorative elements, symbols and structures, which meet in complexly intertwined compositions, and thus I bring these themes not only closer to me, but I hope also closer to the viewer.

List five moments or achievements in your career that fill you with gratitude.

✧ I am very honored to be part of an exhibition „Spring“ this year, with five other Czech artists, on the occasion of The 81st Prague Spring International Music Festival, which will take place in cooperation with KODL gallery.

✧ I am also very happy that I could be part of the group exhibition called Double in Prague City Gallery this year.

✧ Last year I had a very important solo exhibition in the Nová síň Gallery in Prague in cooperation with the Pekelné sáně Gallery in Kroměříž.

✧ In 2023 I had a major solo exhibition in the Czech Center in Vienna.

✧ Another major milestone for me was 2022, in which I became the laureate of the Critics Awards for Young Painters. 

Try to describe your latest artwork.

✧ Homunculus Gigantus

The painting was created during an artist residency at the Pekelné sáně Gallery in Kroměříž. In my painting, the homunculus, or literally an artificially, alchemically created “little man”, emerged from his Self as a germinal Ego that grew into a being whose roots are intertwined in the toxic world of positivity, transparency and information flow. By constantly receiving this contaminated nutrition, the body of this creature begins to take on gigantic proportions. We become homunculi artificially cultivated by the world of plasticity, in which everything can be inflated and deformed according to individual needs and requirements. In the plastic world, boundaries cease to exist. Pure satisfaction comes to the fore, which is devoid of any negativity of resistance.

Everything must be smooth, therefore negativity that creates not only resistance, but also withering or aging, is unacceptable for such a world, because it prevents growth. The stars in my painting, overwhelmed by these permanent demands for positivity, could not bear the weight and fell into black holes to the ground. The black holes laugh maliciously, like emoticons from mobile phone screens, and head, like sperm to an egg, into a gigantic black hole of information, demanding a permanent positive attitude, growth and perfection, which will swallow them up.

Similarly, it is the case with the homunculus' hand, as a protruding perceptual tendril relating to the world. The bluish dying hand of the homunculus is strangled by a rubber band of positive attitude, which creates positive hair waves in all directions. Here a certain visual reversible ambivalence applies, because it is not clear whether the homunculus is swallowed by this rubber band, as in the case of a star by a black hole, or whether it will not grow out of this strangling positivity? This deconstruction of direction remains undiscovered.

In my painting, I implanted a so-called revitalization chip into the homunculus as a kind of medicine that should allow him to return to life, in the sense of experiencing the complete emotional spectrum. As a sentient, experiencing organism, this chip should therefore guarantee him not only the experience of positive emotions, but also negative ones.  As another supportive medicine, tree roots are inserted or grafted into his arm, similar to cannulas, because the mutual connection of blood and sap deepens human sensitivity and a person's belonging to nature. 

I understand the figure of the Homunculus not least as a representative of the victim of the spectacular world, which is closely related to the already mentioned. I present the Homunculus in the composition as a kind of curious discovery to the observing eyes. He thus becomes a kind of stage giant incorporating not only spectacularity, but also all the events, actions and processes around him. In this respect, his body can be perceived not only as a certain collection container, but also as a seedling growing from the toxic foundations of this world.

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Karolína Netolická is an artist who moves carefully through big ideas. The plastic world, the disappearance of human reciprocity, the toxicity of enforced positivity, these are not light subjects, yet they are handled with a kind of decorative intelligence that keeps the work open rather than didactic. The Homunculus, the revitalization chip, the roots grafted like cannulas into an arm: these are images that linger, that ask to be returned to. What connects all of it is a sustained sensitivity to the ordinary, and a conviction that sharpening that sensitivity, in the artist and in the viewer, is itself a meaningful act.