In this 43rd episode of the HIDDEN Podcast, we meet Klára Hartlová and Alexandra Grüner, two emerging voices in Czech contemporary painting whose work draws on psychology, bodily intuition, and the tension between presence and absence. Recorded in the HIDDEN AVU space during their joint exhibition Vestigial, this conversation with Filip Kartousek—joined once again by curator Kamil Princ—offers a deep dive into how emotion, theory, and intuition collide in visual practice.

This episode explores the artists’ shared background in psychology, their current studies in the Drawing Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (originally led by Jiří Petrbok, now under Alice Nikitinová and Matěj Smetana), and how they channel personal experiences—migraines, trauma, memory—into tactile visual form. Their conversation moves through themes of feminine identity, intuition as method, the risk of over-conceptualizing art, and how to keep an image “alive.”

They discuss the lingering influence of Freud’s concept of Das Unheimliche (the uncanny) and Julia Kristeva’s abjection—not as citations, but as frameworks they have internalized and embodied. Their paintings are shaped less by narrative and more by atmosphere, ambiguity, and embodied sensitivity. Kamil reflects on the exhibition as a space between object and image, between sensation and interpretation.

This conversation is in Czech.