Dorota Franková – Tenderness and Pain of Dorota Franková’s Portraits

#2 min Natalie Drtinová, Dorota Franková

30. 7. 2025

Dorota Franková, Untitled #2, From the series Selfportraits, 2022

In her work, Dorota Franková focuses on portraiture. While the portraits of others tend to be full of tenderness and fragility, her own are captured in exacerbated situations or via manipulated photographs that emphasise the restlessness of the mind.

The body comes to the fore in Dorota Franková’s art. Whether it is other people’s bodies or her own, the artist uses these portraits to talk about complicated interpersonal relationships or mental states. An example of “other bodies” is the series chronicling the artist’s grandmother for whom she has been caring long term. Affectionate shots of her limbs and unstylised portraits of her home environment tell the story of their coexistence. A series of photographs from the hospice, where the artist spent some time helping to come to terms with her grandmother’s inevitable death, is captured with similar tenderness.

In depicting herself, Franková focuses mainly on creating self-portraits, which often capture an exacerbated state of mind or some extreme life event. In some of her images, she is accompanied by her “dead brother”, as she calls her “old self”, that is, before she transitioned. Many of the portraits depicting psychological lows are manipulated, drawn over or feature several overlapping images at once, emphasising the artist’s fragmented and troubled mind. In stark contrast to these images are two scenes of married life, which are instead static to the point of exuding calm. In the first, the artist stands in a summer dress, wearing a flower crown. The image is bright and full of colour. One dark detail stands out, however, and that is the bruise under the eye of the artist. In the second, black-and-white image, the author is shown outside drying laundry, again in a dress, but with a completely absent off-camera gaze. If we look closely at the image, we can see the contemplation going on in her mind about her marriage, her role as a housewife, and the exaggerated femininity she had felt the need to fulfil up until that point.

Text: Natálie Drtinová

Image captions

1 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #2, From the series Selfportraits, 2022
2 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #4, From the series States, 2017
3 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #12, From the series States, 2017
4 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #1, From the series States, 2017
5 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #4, From the series Selfportraits, 2022
6 | Dorota Franková, Untitled #2, From the series States, 2017

Natalie Drtinová

is an art theorist focusing on the intersection of art and social issues. She is involved in curating, gallery production, and art criticism. She is a member of the Czech association ABCD dedicated to art brut and manages the archive of Anna Zemánková.

Dorota Franková

is a Czech photographer finishing her studies of photography at the Libuše Jarcovjáková’s studio at the Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar in Pilsen. She is engaged in various professions such as social worker in nursing home. In 2022, she devoted a photographic series in a hospice, where she encountered the passing of people to the other side. Here she interviewed dying people and documented their last moments. She has also been working on a documentary about her ailing grandmother for several years. She enjoys fashion photography and loves collaborating with musicians on their album booklets. A core part of her work is self-reflection and understanding emotional states and their reflection in photography.

#48 About Me

Let’s talk about ourselves. Let’s explore what we are and discover who we are. This is important because just as it is necessary to look around us, it is essential to look within ourselves. How does our identity change over time? And how can all of this be captured? For this issue, we have chosen to focus on authors who ask similar questions and possess the ability to reflect them visually in compelling ways. Emília Rigová has long explored the position of the Roma minority, using her own physicality to highlight the voice of the Roma people, a voice that is often marginalized. Libuše Jarcovjáková has been involved in photographic self-reflection since a young age, with her photos and diary entries capturing the ideological tension of collapsing socialism and the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals within subcultures. A strong thematic thread emerges in the exploration of gender and queer identity in the works of Dorota Franková, Robert Gabris, Sasha Chaika, František Fekete, and Shalva Nikvashvili. Original artistic autotherapy often requiring significant courage to reveal oneself here transforms into a form of therapy for society.