Laura Limbourg: Hump in Honey

Bilingual catalog for the Hump In Honey exhibition by artist Laura Limbourg.

Laura Limbourg's paintings present a strong personal experience, in which the shock of the phenomenon of open sex tourism, which she encountered during her travels in Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand, turned into. The author herself talks about social contrasts, which are not only shocking for a European, but also difficult to understand. In countries with a strong Buddhist tradition, a consistently cultivated religious reverence is found right next to total human misery, redeemed, among other things, by the slavery of prostitution, to which the local authorities turn a blind eye for economic reasons. Strong local traditional cultures and captivating nature are permeated here by the devaluation of human life and its meaning. Organized crime seems to be encapsulated in a system of offered services and masked by tourist-acceptable and seemingly harmless forms of supply and demand. Human misery is sold here as a souvenir to visitors from rich countries. Laura Limbourg has created a unique "narrative language" in which she subtly combines attributes and symbols of traditional Asian cultures with references to the visual world of advertising, promotion, marketing and kitsch. He unites them in the manner of "quick" painting, the stylization of which he draws from quick travel sketches and watercolor notes. From the original travel or diary entries, larger and larger paintings were created after the return. Asia lit up the author's palette, which before was rather monochromatically dark and the images more descriptive. Nor is the influence of classical ink techniques or painting on porcelain associated with the region of East Asia negligible. The watercolor technique inspired the author to loosen the handwriting, to reduce the form and to the specific "lightness" of painting in transparent layers and bright colors, for which she sought the possibility of scale enlargements. The advantage and recognizable quality of Laura Limbourg's paintings is a generous expressive shorthand, which keeps the communicated emotions in exactly the vividness and immediacy in which they arise involuntarily. The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog of the same name, Hump In Honey, complete with an introduction by the curator Petr Vaňous and an interview with the painter.

Curator, texts: Petr Vaňous
Book and exhibition production: Blanka Čermáková, Veronika Čechmánková
Graphics: Ondřej Šorm
Translation: Phill Jones
Proofreading: Tereza Hubáčková
Photo: Aneta Zimová Vrkotová, author's archive
Printing: Tiskárna Helbich, a. s.
Number of prints: 333 pcs
ISBN 978-80-908062-6-9
Published by Spolek Trafačka as its 34th publication