Get in touch / Napište mi
lifebybro@gmail.com

česky​​​

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BRO. is the artistic practice of textile artist and designer Ivana Kocmanová, whose primary medium is hand embroidery.

 

She did not choose embroidery. It came back to her.

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As a child, she embroidered with her aunt, who had taught herself while in prison. Her aunt sent the family doilies from there, and they lay on the tables in their living room. At the time, they were simply part of the home. Only much later did she realize that in prison, embroidery may have been one of the few spaces that belonged to her aunt alone—to her hands and her thoughts.

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She returned to embroidery by chance as an adult. Her hands remembered before she did, and she gradually came to understand that, for her too, embroidery is bound up with personal freedom. That freedom still guides the images she chooses. She needs to sense it in an image, most often in a movement, a gesture, a distinctive appearance, or a moment when no one seems to be watching—when someone behaves inappropriately or falls outside a prescribed role. Sometimes freedom is directly present; at other times, it appears through its opposite—in constraint, exhaustion, or the desire to escape.

 

She uses traditional embroidery to capture images of contemporary life. Her experience of motherhood brought the question of personal freedom into direct relation with her own time, body, and space. This is also where the feminist dimension of her work comes from, though she does not feel the need to express it literally.

 

She is drawn to non-idealized bodies, figures that resist easy categorization, and gestures in which seriousness meets humor and exaggeration. She works with both her own and found photographs, but she does not reproduce them literally. She removes their surroundings, alters colors, proportions, and details, and sometimes constructs a figure from several different images. Above all, she tries to preserve the movement or atmosphere that made her stop at the image in the first place.

 

She embroiders entirely by hand, using exceptionally fine silk threads that allow her to capture a subtle facial expression, a glance, or the slightest shift in a gesture. She almost always uses silk as the ground as well. Its fine structure allows her to work in detail, while its sheen and movement become part of the image.

 

We photograph almost everything and then forget almost all of it. Through embroidery, she remakes a chosen image with her own hands. What began as a quick digital record acquires a physical presence, touch, and time. Her work takes shape in the tension between the control embroidery demands and the freedom she seeks in the image.

 

Ivana Kocmanová has exhibited in the Czech Republic and internationally. She was nominated for the Czech Grand Design Award, and her work is represented in the permanent collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno.

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PERMANENT COLLECTION

 

Museum of Applied Arts, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic

 

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

 

2022 — Designblok Awards, Veolia Award for the Best Sustainable Design Project, nominee
2020 — Czech Grand Design Awards 2019, nominee
2019 — Designblok Awards 2019, nominee

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023 — You Are My Good Days, CZECHDESIGN, Prague, Czech Republic
2018 — Stitched Into Your Heart, Krystal Gallery, Havířov, Czech Republic

 

GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

 

2026 — Dance Inappropriately, Baby!, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2025 — Life Lately, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2024 — Ručne? Stručne!, Galéria Statua, Bratislava, Slovakia
2023 — Goddess Bless Ya, Love Ya, Ciao!, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2023 — Good Times, The Gallery, Austin, Texas, USA
2022 — Posh_Trash_22, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2022 — 14th International Textile and Fibre Art Biennial “Scythia,” Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine
2021 — Ordinary Folk, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2021 — British Textile Biennial, Blackburn Cathedral, United Kingdom
2020 — New Urban Tattoo, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2019 — Křehký Mikulov, Central European Festival of Art and Design, Mikulov, Czech Republic
2019 — New Urban Picnic, Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic
2018 — Designblok, Prague, Czech Republic

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

 

2018 — Designblok Book 2018: Research into the Meaning of Things, Profil Media

 

PROJECTS

 

2019 — Street installations, Bushwick, New York, USA
2018 — Street installations, Red Hook, New York, USA