Tereza Horáček

Bio

Characterised by a combination of evocative colours, textured brushstrokes, fluorescent-orange backgrounds and loose washes, Tereza Horáček reworks and layers paint to combine painting techniques reminiscent of the Old Masters with gestural brushstrokes. Her pastoral scenes draw inspiration from Dutch seventeenth-century paintings and English eighteenth-century landscape painting. Broad meadows, swaying trees and expansive skies are recurring motifs within her work.

Horáček’s relationship with art history is central to the way she develops her paintings. While studying at the Slade, she regularly visited the National Gallery to draw directly from paintings before returning to the studio to work from her sketches and memories of what she had seen. She continues to draw from historic works in museums, sometimes responding directly to a particular painting and at other times taking only a tree, a colour or part of a composition as the starting point for something new.

Artists including Jacob van Ruisdael, Aert van der Neer, Constable and Gainsborough recur as references, but the resulting landscapes are rarely straightforward recreations. Instead, observed and remembered elements are combined into imagined places that feel both recognisable and slightly removed from reality.

Colour plays an important role in this shift. Pink, green and purple skies, fluorescent grounds and silhouetted trees give the works a contemporary character, despite their connection to much older traditions of landscape painting. The result is a body of work that looks backwards while remaining distinctly present, using the history of landscape painting as material for new and imagined worlds.

Tereza Horáček studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2016–2020).  Recent exhibitions include ‘Afterlight’, Irving Gallery, Oxford, March-April 2026; ‘Small Plates’, Magdalen Road Studios, Oxford, September 2025; ‘Back To My Trees’ curated by Kate Shooter, Terrace Gallery, London, August–September 2025; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025, London; and the Irving Open 2025, March–April 2025. She lives and works in Oxford, UK.