Tereza Eisnerová’s sculptural works often straddle the line between fine art and small-scale decorative sculpture that has been placed in the role of jewellery. Her exceptional sense for detail has led her to create small works, using sculptural modelling to make each piece of jewellery a unique work of art. Her relationship to the figure sculpture of past eras, in particular Art Nouveau and the art of the Decadents, means that she works with motifs associated with those movements: a focus on ornamentation, the magic of the plant and animal kingdoms, human skulls and vanitas. Snapdragons, Flowers of Evil was made as an homage to the ‘accursed poet’ for the exhibition Alone in the Crowd: Charles Baudelaire and Czech Art. She is similarly fascinated by the surrealist world of Jan Švankmajer and his bizarre objects and assemblages inspired by animals and fossils. Nevertheless, she discovered her central theme – the skull – spontaneously while still at the Václav Hollar secondary school of art in the second half of the 1990s. And her interest in anatomy and in collecting bones and objects from nature goes even further back. She revisited the subject of the vanitas after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and around 2018 followed on this theme by working with sculptures of mummies and skeletons that maintain a relationship with the physical world in order to ensure eternal life. In these works, she explored questions of physical ephemerality, mortality and the indestructible soul.

Over the course of her career as an artist, Eisnerová has worked with a whole range of traditional and contemporary materials or combinations thereof, but in recent years she has focused on ceramics and porcelain in particular. She is fascinated by its softness, noble characteristics and smooth surface, and its solid as well as delicate nature. Over the years, she has developed her own original style in this medium that distinctively pushes the boundaries of the usual ways in which this material is worked. Especially in her miniatures, she makes full use of its potential. Although Eisnerová also creates life-sized figures and large-format sculptures and reliefs, it is thanks to her masterful work with miniatures and the expressive subject of mummies and other elements of the macabre that she truly stands out among Czech sculptors today.

Mummies in Lace marks the first representative overview of this part of her fine art and design work.

Tereza Eisnerová (born 1981) is a figure sculptor and medal maker. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2006–2012), where she studied in professor Jindřich Zeithammel’s sculpture studio and professor Jan Hendrych’s figure sculpture and medal-making studio. Besides the human figure, she is also drawn to motifs from the animal kingdom, which she depicts in both sculptures and reliefs. In recent years, she has also worked in the field of design, especially jewellery. Her sculptural style mixes elements of classical modelling in the style of the Old Masters with experimental methods such as assemblage or physical imprints. Her most recent showing was at Animálie, a joint exhibition with Michal Cihlář at Prague’s Galerie 1 (2025). At GASK, she could previously be seen in the 2021–2022 exhibition Alone in the Crowd: Charles Baudelaire and Czech Art. Other past exhibitions include Vanitas (DOX, Prague 2021), A Dream within a Dream: Edgar Allan Poe and Art in the Czech Lands (National Gallery Prague, 2020) and Art-Brut-All (DOX, Prague 2019).