Photography exhibition of Veronika Lukášová: Market Forces
1. August 2025We invite you to an exhibition of photographs by Veronika Lukášová at the ZPAF Photography Gallery in Wrocław, which will take place from August 7 to 31, 2025. The exhibition is curated by Helena Lukášová. Veronika worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Multimedia Communications, where she taught the subject Art Market. Veronika worked as a freelance photographer, and her photographs were published in the New York Times and Washington Post Magazine in the US. In Czech periodicals, her work appeared in Hospodářské noviny, Zen, and many others. Among other awards, she is also the winner of the 2009 Czech Press Photo award.
Veronika Lukášová
Veronika Lukášová was a photographer and theorist whose work explored scientific and technological progress through the prism of politics, history, and art. She studied musicology and Czech literature at Masaryk University, then moved to the United States, where she worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media outlets. After many years in the US, she moved to the UK, where she studied documentary photography at the University of the Arts London, then successfully completed her doctorate at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology. Her interests expanded to include the relationship between humans and nature and the cosmos – from the basic building blocks of life to the possibilities of interplanetary travel. She was a member of the Nuclear Culture Group and has won numerous awards, including Czech Press Photo, Women in Photography International, Prix de la Photographie Paris, and International Photography Awards. Her work has been presented at festivals in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and the Czech Republic. Her photographs and texts have been published in magazines such as Excerpt and Bifurcaciones, Lidové noviny magazine, and others.
The exhibition of the recently deceased photographer Veronika Lukášová presents two of her projects created over the last three years. Four years ago, a diagnosis of rare cancer profoundly influenced her approach to creative work, focusing on the meaning of life in the broader context of relationships in nature, as a living symbiotic coexistence. In the projects Market Forces and Ways of Flesh, she explores transformation—of nature, the body, and cultural meaning—examining beauty and deformation, individuality and mutation, and the shifting boundary between the human and the artificial. Market Forces returns to the tulip mania of the 17th century, focusing on parrot tulips with spectacular mutations caused by viruses, which were once mistakenly believed to be divine influence. By photographing these flowers, which she grew herself, she explores the tension between natural form and artificial enhancement, revealing how desire, status, and profit drive the manipulation and idolization of nature—a dynamic that persists from historical cultivation to contemporary bioengineering. In Ways of Flesh, she turns inward, seeking visual parallels between the wrinkles and textures of the human body and the distorted shapes of fruits and vegetables. Here, deformation becomes a place of resonance rather than alienation; it is a meditation on the uniqueness, vulnerability, and quiet rhythms that shape all living things. Emerging from darkness, her images reveal intimate yet universal forms, hinting at deep patterns that connect life across scales and species.
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