Katarina Janečková Walshe’s painterly practice has long explored complexities of female-identified experience, including sexuality, domesticity, and motherhood. Ten years ago, when she moved from her hometown of Bratislava, Slovakia to Corpus Christi, Texas, she was prompted to examine how those aspects of experience manifest in American and Texan culture. In this installation, titled Mother Land, the artist extends her inquiry to contemplate the transformative potential that applying a mother’s love and care universally might unleash.

What could the world become if all humans nurtured one another as a mother does her child? Can we recognize and act upon our inherent interconnectedness as humans sharing one Earth? If societies prioritized women and invested in the people’s collective health and security, how might the world transform? And how might the Earth benefit if we extended such nurturing care to our planet?

In Mother land, Janečková Walshe, with a new suite of paintings and her first-ever sculpture, invites viewers to consider these questions. A painted poem, expressing her reflections on the state of our world, encourages collective responsibility and hope for the future. The sculpture, which expands her paintings’ recurring maternal figure into three dimensions, shelters ceramic figurines resembling the paintings’ children, and invites play within a womb-like cavity. Completing the picture, the surrounding paintings, embodying themes including sacrifice, protection, love, sorrow, and joy, evoke the true complexity of human experience.

While making her artwork, the artist incorporates contributions by her young daughters—Alenka, five, and Vida, two. She begins each work with the canvas on the floor, which enables her children to walk on or mark its surface spontaneously. The children’s marks, which constellate the often chaotic aspects of motherhood, introduce unpredictable elements to which the artist responds with compassion and ingenuity, thus modelling a profound respect for the next generation’s potential to inspire constructive change.

(Curated by Robin K. Williams, Outgoing Curator, The Contemporary Austin and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art)

Katarina Janečková Walshe (b. 1988 in Bratislava, Slovakia; lives in Corpus Christi, Texas) works across media, employing paper, canvas, bedsheets, and a wide array of mark-making tools to critique received notions of authentic culture, gender norms, sexual expression, and national pride. Her process is free-ranging and improvisational, and she uses her own sexuality, motherhood, and identity as a painter as characters in the often humorous and erotic scenes she envisions. Most recently she has trained her critical attention and transgressive methodologies on fallacies of contemporary American life, a happy result of her time spent living in Texas, even as her commitments to social justice and the cathartic potential of figurative painting remain free of geographical or national specificity.

Janečková Walshe has exhibited extensively in galleries and art spaces worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Harkawik, New York and Los Angeles; Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam; Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, Belgium; Asia Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan; and Dittrich and Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany; as well as group exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. Her work is held in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida; Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida; and X Museum, Beijing, China. She received her MFA in painting from the Academy of Fine Art in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her exhibition at The Contemporary Austin is the artist’s first solo museum presentation.