Maternity Vacation is a 56 page cloth-bound hardcover volume illustrating Katarina Janečková Walshe's creative journey over the past two years, culminating in the creation of new works large and small. More akin to an artist's book than a traditional monograph, the volume documents the free-ranging nature of Janečková Walshe's practice, in which her identity as a mother and daughter, status as a mythological figure (the artist), object of desire and vessel for life, joyful participant in cultural theater, and social critic fixated on the peculiarities of Americana, are upended, relished, made absurd and reconciled in paint. A new essay by Emily Farranto explores the relationship between Freud's notion of the Madonna-Mistress complex and the bountiful women of Janečková Walshe's paintings.
Designed and printed in Slovakia by Nenad Branković, Maternity Vacation is available in an edition of 500. 20 copies feature covers handpainted and autographed by the artist and her daughter Alenka, along with a 7 x 5 inch soy ink risograph insert.
Born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1988, Katarina Janečková Walshe has exhibited widely abroad, recently at Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam (2022 and 2020), Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp (2022), Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin (2020 and 2021) and Asia Art Center, Taipei (2021). Janečková Walshe is the subject of many texts, interviews and monographs. Janečková Walshe studied in Slovakia and New York and currently lives and works in Corpus Christi, TX with her husband Robert and their two children. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first in New York, will take place this Spring.