Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present for the first time in Italy “Forest”, Jitka Hanzlovà’s new photographic project, recently exhibited at the Folkwang Museum in Essen and now installed as a whole in the gallery space.

Jitka Hanzlovà is internationally known for her analytical photographic research started in the ‘90s with “Bewohner” and proceeded with “Rokytnìk” from 1997, “Vielsalm” from 1999, “Female” from 2000 and “Brixton” from 2002.

If we look at these cycles of images and especially at the photographs from “Vielsalm” we can easily track a deep interest in landscape and its most microscopic details.

“Forest” represents the extreme development of this attention: it consists of 45 photographs, shot between 2000 and 2005, where Jitka Hanzlovà faces classic iconography of the woods in a strongly anti-classical manner, as Urs Stahel suggests. Almost every image portraits the forest in the different aspects it assumes throughout the seasons (aesthetic and poetical choice already taken for “Rokytnik”): trunks, branches, roots, mosses, herbs are always photographed at night or at dusk, exaggerating the natural light to create a variety of nuances from iridescent to mat to saturated.

Jitka Hanzlovà’s long research and her extenuating night trips into the woods are what we can call an internal journey of the artist and an attempt to find and to explore her ancient roots, her ancestral ego, the personal and collective original memory.

“Forest” is a journey through her own forests, the ones of childhood and of youth, a journey through the complex records of the time before her political exile.