Character Studies

Ester Krumbachová’s work is interwoven with the dynamics of the relationship between the female and male world, and she was particularly interested in men and their world. She realized that power was in the hands of men and that women were ascribed to be passive. “Men, with their skills of imagination, declared themselves to be superior beings, the more intelligent, more capable ones, they created god-men, usually grumpy and cruel old men, vain, self-opinionated, requiring respect and praise, disregarding the suffering of those around them. It’s ridiculous that such a picture of tyranny was accepted by women, who were always subject to this god’s disdain, and often more than by their inventors.” In her black fairy tales, stories, and essays, however, she transcended this binary, and it seems that she wanted to shatter it in a tangle of constant transformations of identities.

Ester Krumbachová had an excellent talent for observation. She did not see otherness as exoticism. For her, otherness and exoticism were more a matter of ethics. She herself deviated from all norms with her eccentricity and uncategorizability. Otherness was natural to her, which gave her a great deal of independence. Her exotic drawings, however, also betray the viewpoint of a costume designer who placed importance on observing how people dress, how their clothes communicate with their bodies, what they are communicating, how they get the look they want.