Ludmila Hrachovinová is a Slovak-born artist based in Bratislava and Frankfurt. She maintains a studio at Basis in Frankfurt. Her artistic practice primarily focuses on painting but also includes sculpture, installation, and performance. Hrachovinová holds degrees from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She later continued her studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she worked in the studio of Amy Sillman and Monika Baer. In 2020, she was a finalist for the prestigious Oskár Čepan Award. Her work has been showcased in a range of solo and group exhibitions and artist residencies among others at Knoll Gallery, Budapest and Vienna; Batumi, Georgia; Basis Project Raum, Frankfurt; Temporary Parapet, Bratislava; The Youth Gallery, Nitra; Műtő, Budapest. Additionally, her work has been presented in Sweden, Norway, Germany, France and Czech Republic, among other locations. In 2019, she received a grant from the Swedish Art Academy, which enabled her to participate in a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. From 2018 to 2022, Hrachovinová was a member of HotDock Project Space, an artist-run initiative in Bratislava. During this period, she curated, coordinated, and collaborated on numerous international exhibitions.

Ludmila Hrachovinová is primarily a painter, a crucial moment of her work is nevertheless formed by continuous placement of the medium in relation to broader issues in contemporary art. The monumental character of most of her paintings is related not only to their format, but also to the corporally felt dimensions of the forms depicted. These are conceived in the artist’s present paintings as a thoroughly abstracted dialog between masses of color, yet their relation to the spectators is felt as figurative. The creator sees a painting as not merely a passive object neutrally placed somewhere in a gallery, on the contrary, it becomes an active player in custom made spatial installations which place the spectator in the role of a participant in the dialog. The artist’s interest in physical relations between painting and the human body has in her recent works culminated in involvement of performers whose activities are directed mainly towards accentuation of corporal sharing between the image spaces of paintings and the physical dimensions of the space between them.
Viktor Čech, Art Critique and Art Historian, CZ

Ludmila Hrachovinová’s residency was supported by using public funds of the Slovak Arts Council.