About

Julie Machallova

Education

• University of Ostrava, CZ Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting
• University of Ostrava, CZ Faculty of Education, Art Education
• Art Highschool Ostrava, CZ Department of Painting

Study Art Internship

• Escuela de Arte de Sevilla, Spain Department of Mosaic, Mural techniques and Enamelled Jewelry

Other Interships

• ETI executive/training/institute Malta – CLIL methods for art education
• Istituto di Istruzione Superiore Luca Signorelli, Cortona, Italy – multimedia art workshops

“Everything in our lives is a mirror.”

Julie Machallova’s artistic exploration focuses on love, intimacy and female sexuality, asking whether true love can exist in a time of increasingly fragile relationships. Her paintings explore vulnerability, desire, introspection, loneliness, memories and the fleeting beauty of intimate moments.

Drawing on Freud and Jung, she understands love as a mirror—a space of projection through which we encounter another person and ourselves. Desire, loss and abandonment become a path to self-knowledge: learning to love one’s own life without losing oneself in another.

Female sexuality is central to her work as a form of freedom and self-acceptance. Beyond age and social roles, women desire to be seen, desired and to experience intimacy. Her paintings embrace the imperfect body, sensuality and confidence.

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She appears to be an ecstatic beauty among abandonment, nostalgia, and eroticism. The painting speaks of dreams and abandonment to reality, and of the body and life.

Roberto Mastroianni  (Philosopher, Anthropologist, Ph.D., Art Critic and Curator, Torino, IT)

Paintings with architecture

The environment plays an essential role in Julie’s paintings, the scenery in which the figure is set. For the most part, they are made up of monumental scenes that fill the background, and it does not matter whether they are urban or natural landscapes. They encode the feeling of being in humble relation to a transcending entity. Julie likes to stop time in paintings.

Certainly, for Julie Machallova’s painterly thinking, the common theme is one of uncompromising solitude. The visual action actor is burdened by our attention, voyeurically observed, grappling with something serious. But the severity is not demonstrated by a radical dynamic gesture; on the contrary, the figures are mostly calm and static. Julie likes to stop time in paintings.

  texted by Jaroslav Michna (art critic and curator and curator Gallery of Fine Art Ostrava)