We cordially invite you to the exhibition of Julie Daňhelová's exhibition Unearth Me.  

The black-and-white drawings of Julie Daňhelová balance between historical document and fantastical imagination. Her works are mounted in custom-made frames, often adorned with original carvings. Her art practice extends beyond paper to include in-situ installations – objects that evoke alchemical experiments and silent rituals.

Drawn with delicate graphite pencil on handmade paper, Daňhelová’s works fascinate with their perfection. Although the elaborate execution may appear as a result of meticulous preparation, their precision and rhythm emerge from an intense focus – from a meditative state of mind in which thought, hand, and paper become one. The drawing itself leads the process. What unfolds are mysterious environments filled with intricate details and encoded meanings. The scenes may resemble hermetic images, conveying deep wisdom. The artist’s work with paper reinforces this transmission of knowledge; though fragile, paper has served since ancient times as a tool of civilizations to leave their imprint on history.

From the Ore Mountains come stories of how people once subdued the landscape, and at the same time how the landscape quietly shapes human lives. Starting in the sixteenth century, the Ore Mountains experienced a mining fever. People from all over Europe – Venetians, Saxons, Czechs – came to the region, united by the vision of gaining wealth from the metal in the earth’s depths. Everything born here has been repeatedly extracted, plundered, and rediscovered. The burdensome history of the Sudetenland transforms in the artist’s drawings into a poetry of fateful cycles, an endless excavation of the memory of people and places.

During this period, a gentler Ore Mountains tradition came into being – bobbin lace. The entrepreneur, philanthropist, and pioneer of Ore Mountain lace-making, Barbara Uthmann from Annaberg, provided work for hundreds of women and later also for the male miners themselves, who in the evenings, when winter closed the mines, spun threads instead of ore to earn extra income. The contrast between the hard labor in the depths and the delicate movement of hands creating webs of thread is essential for Julie Daňhelová: two sides of the same coin, two ways in which a person transforms matter – and themselves.

Fragments of the past appear on the frames themselves, decorated with chipped pieces of mother-of-pearl. It was from these shells that ornamental buttons used to be made in Kraslice, where Julie has been spending her time since childhood. The leftovers from home production ended up scattered throughout the landscape. Julie finds the discarded material and incorporates it into her works as a memento of what once connected people to their land. The cassetta frames, forming a whole with the drawings, are created in collaboration with Kryštof Kučera and become original artefacts – another layer in the story of transformation and continuity.

Her work with materials evokes an alchemical process – the transmutation of found fragments into new forms that carry both awareness and purification. Mining becomes a metaphor for uncovering layers and transformation – the reshaping of matter as well as of the past. Here, art becomes a process of sublimation through which the artist regenerates the soil and the soul of both place and people. The ghosts of the Ore Mountains are not shadows of the past but a living presence around and within us, with whom Julie engages in a silent dialogue. The exhibition title Unearth me symbolically calls for rediscovery and understanding.

The land is both an archive and a warning. In a time when the prospect of lithium mining is once again discussed, her work serves as a reminder that the earth is not an inexhaustible resource, but a living body to which we are bound by responsibility and memory.

Adéla Janíčková