Vienna Time

Interview with Beáta Hechtová

• Liudmila Kirsanova • Season 3 • Episode 3

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 35:57

What if the future feels dangerous and tender at the same time? We sit with visual artist Beáta Hechtová to wander through her post‑collapse worlds, where faceless figures grow thorns, bodies melt beyond gender, and cultures are rebuilt through ritual and care. These scenes are not about escape; they are about returning to empathy, crafting belief systems from scraps, and finding a way to belong amid uncertainty.

Beáta introduces the idea of “futuristic folklore,” a living myth that fuses sacred plants, drifting liquid energies, and ceremonies formed after a fall. The last orchid sealed under glass becomes a relic worth protecting; bubbles hover like new ideologies or digital spirits; and an unknown light source glows just out of reach, pulling characters forward. Her colours carry the rainforest’s heat and saturation while her surfaces slip toward a digital smoothness, echoing VR’s cinematic skies and the soft shimmer of post‑internet light. The effect is immersive: paintings that feel screen‑born and sculptures that invite touch, from fluffy tentacles to carnivorous forms lit from within.

We explore how hope works as a practice rather than a promise. Nature pushes back, technology liquefies into belief, and desire refuses to die. Beáta traces influences from neo‑surrealism to contemporary installation, shares plans for whale‑bone scale and soundscapes, and reflects on why she might choose to live inside the worlds she paints. The result is a conversation about adaptation, community, and the art of holding beauty and threat in the same frame.

If you’re drawn to contemporary art, neo‑surrealism, speculative futures, and the meeting point of ecology and technology, this journey will stay with you. Listen, subscribe, and leave a review to tell us: which part of humanity would you carry into a new world?

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Hi, it's Vienna Time with Ludmila Kirzanova. For my podcast, I interview artists who live and work in Vienna, a place both grandly old and vivaciously young. Whether my guests were born here, chose, or happen to be here, I am keen on giving voices and sharing stories of very different artists belonging with different traditions and generations. I do gravitate towards profound interviews rather than sketches and brief questionnaires, and that's why you'll find here in-depth talks embracing both professional and personal insights. Considering my curatorial practice, I've been meeting extraordinary artists and witnessing wonderful art projects that no doubt will go down the history. And now I'm eager to share it with you to give an inside look at the local art scene which is as vibrant and diverse as personalities creating it. Let's explore and celebrate it together. And today my guest is Beáta Hechtová. Hello Beáta.

Beáta Hechtová :

Hello Ludmilla.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Beáta is a visual artist who works with painting, drawing, printmaking, and also installation and sculpture. And if you look at Beáta's world, at Beáta's body of work, you would travel far away. It looks very dreamlike, like a place that belonged to somewhere else. But at the same time, you always question, is it a world that comes instead of our world? Or is it a world somewhere far away too rich? And the creatures that we encounter in your paintings, I believe we as spectators always ask, are there any other monsters existing somewhere else? Or are there new formations and organisms that succeed us and come to be instead of us? Or are those us just being transformed to adapt to new conditions and environments and to populate new landscapes? And just before the interview, we talked with Beáta that nevertheless it her painting, her body of work looks very fantastically surrealistic and out of reality. At the same time, Beáta told me that it's about reality and it's about experiences and ideas that we are living through right now. And I think today in our interview, I would love to talk about this loop of how looking at something kind of distant and different, we still come back to us and to our world and to our experience and to our troubles and thoughts. And maybe I would start with your text that I found on your uh homepage because you also write very, very interesting about what you do. I really loved that passage. I will quote it now. I depict humans as tribes of few leftovers, fighting their vulnerable structures to feed into the newly arranged world, crawling around, lost in the landscapes, they search for updated versions of belief systems and experience curious encounters with unfamiliar substances.

Beáta Hechtová :

So in my paintings I often depict some kind of figures which seem to be quite lost and like searching around in like empty landscapes or like post-apocalyptic speculative scenarios one cannot really say where it is, if it's the far future on this earth or if it's some different planet where they're trying to escape to, or if it's some fantastical land which just doesn't exist. So they don't usually have faces because they're like trying to represent more of a like generally humankind than one individual. And they're just like meeting these strange substances in this landscape and trying to like understand and establish kind of a new culture. Like after some collapse, they try to put together the pieces and like survive and do it again in a different way with different rules.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

It's a very dystopic scenario, what you think? I mean it you say about collapse that had already happened, and then the leftovers they try to reassemble the world. So it's a very this apocalyptic vision of the future, very dystopic vision of the future.

Beáta Hechtová :

Well, in a way it is, but I I also try to put like a lot of hope in it because it's not the definitive end, like some leftovers still survived, and they have like the new chance. They they can do it better, they can maybe have more empathy and understanding and like try to collaborate together and like create some kind of different society which has completely different rules and do some conversation with the environment so we can like coexist here together somehow in this new arranged world. So for me, it seems like very dystopian, but it actually is not.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And also these leftovers they acquire new features, they acquire new nails and thorns coming out of their spying, their bodies transformed, and they also acquire some more animal-looking parts like animal pores, or maybe even like tentacles. So it's uh also this new new body to feed the new environment. When I look at your painting, it seems to be very poetic, the way how you transform a human body.

Beáta Hechtová :

Well, so this transformation, it's part of this evolution I try to pursue. So, like in the far future, the human body always adapts. Uh like any living forms always adapt to the new environment, and they're changing their forms and structures, so that's why they started to grow these thorns to like try to survive in this rougher environment and like mutate with different creatures, so like they can have less water or somehow fit to this circumstances, and then it develops throughout my work kind of as a story, like like the story of evolution a little bit. So later in the new series, the people start to be like transparent, which is like the could be seen as like the next stage of some kind of evolution when they're like changing some biological form completely. But I also like this ambivalence in this idea that it could also mean that they actually didn't make it and just died, which would be then you know, some kind of form of afterlife. So you never know actually if it's positive or negative or what it actually means, if they're dead or not, and that I kind of like this.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And at the same time, there is a new sexuality also in this bodies. When you look at these bodies, you see how you enjoy painting the skin, the naked backs, the buttoned-up pants, silver, tight pants on their thighs, feet with long a bit curled nails. I mean there is also enjoyment, this excitement about the new body to come.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, I've tried to kind of blend this border between gender, for example, that I don't really paint like uh female or male figures, I just kind of do some kind of human body and it kind of melts together and it's not decided what gender it is, which somehow it's like for me the idea of future when this is not really important, not in a way that I would know how would it then work to reproduce or something, but just more that it doesn't matter what gender it is, it's like all creatures in the same starting point going somewhere together, building it together.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

You have this idea of a figure, like you've just said, but the figure is always positioned within a landscape, and it's this situation that we, if we look back in the art history, we can see this approach very much developed in surrealism, this idea of um alienated, empted, or of an um strange landscape within which then you have a figure. It's a bit of this idea of a space which is real and unreal. We don't know if it is a space of a dream, of a nightmare, of another reality, and then a figure. And we've talked with you right now just before the interview about the emergence of new surrealistic painting which develop these ideas of figure and landscape, dream more towards the line of technology and merging of human and AI. And I would love to ask, how do you relate? Do you relate your body of work to this new surrealism?

Beáta Hechtová :

I mean, I don't like to categorize much my work, but in the sense of new surrealism or neo-surrealism, I can imagine that there is some connection to it, for sure, in a sense that it allows to some kind of like irrational emotional world to exist, but not in a way that for the fantasy sake that uh I want to escape reality, but more in a way of like trying to through imagining these landscapes, trying to cope with the actual real things and real themes which preoccupy me or us, and just try to like build my own point of view or like try to understand the systems around me through this.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And also if we think about surrealism, it was always infused very much with self-reflection and psychological ideas and this idea of self-exploration. So this idea of traveling inside.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, exactly. Like, you can cope with so it like helps to cope with this kind of fear or an unsureness of like today's world, or you know, like grief of what could be or what is happening, and to find some kind of hope or to project some kind of hope.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

What kind of hope? It's about that we will still be able to survive and that we will still be able to be human beings, and that we will still be able to live further as human beings, this kind of hope, or that we will be able to become like new plants and be like a new forest. I don't know.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, actually, for me it's not hope in a sense that we will survive for the sake of survival, but more of this returning to like community and like belonging and and some kind of understanding with environment, some kind of like empathy.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Of course, you do explore these ideas of post-human, of post-humanism, of this post-catastrophical vision. When you do it, it has this feeling of this new connection also to the natural world, even though then it would be transformed. I was thinking about this uh new connection with the natural world that you try to tell, to show, and then again in one of your texts I found what you say futuristic folklore, which is a very interesting because folklore is it's a cosmology, right? It's like a cosmological storytelling about how the world is built, how it functions, what we believe in, what's around so folklore is also something very ancient in a way, right? This oral telling of stories about the world, and then you say futuristic folklore.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, this term kind of just came up while I was working on this theme and developing this series, and it just really seemed to fit quite well because I'm like through the paintings kind of trying to develop like some potential culture, new culture, where I'm like inspired by different rituals, also like ancient and also legends and myths and like fairy tales and this kind of storytelling as you were mentioning before. But I look at it from like different points of view or perspective.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And let's talk about your inspirations because I read, for example, that you spent almost two years in the rainforest in South America, and uh that's for sure influenced also, I think, the way how you see colours because your colors are extremely vibrant and bright.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, for sure that inspired me a lot. I first went to Perulima like for free mover through university for a year, and then I kind of stayed there and went to the Amazonas to stay there for another year, and definitely influenced me a lot, like my relationship to nature and to colours for sure, and to like perceiving different new culture and like this melting plot of cultures, which is the mixtures of like our culture and their culture and the different religions kind of colliding together. All of this kind of influenced my work a lot. But then in the end, it turned out that I don't feel like I really belong there or I'm meant to be looking for these things since my culture is very different. So maybe that's why then I turned into this post-caporcablistic scenario because I felt like I still need to find this kind of connection which I couldn't maybe allow myself to seek for there. And yeah, then I kind of got lost in this inner landscapes more.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

But tell me more about your culture, about your background. You say that it's very different. Uh, I know that you were born in Czech Republic in Prague. I know also that you grew up in an artistic family.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, that's true. My parents were both actors, so I grew up around acting people and like circus clown people or like dancers or also lots of colours, right? If you think about lots of colours, lots of costumes and masks, a lot of movement, and it was really fun. A lot of people always around.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Beautiful. But then for you, the decision to become an artist, was it something that you grew up with?

Beáta Hechtová :

You didn't not at all. I didn't really like I was not drawn to the acting at all. And I thought I would be doing something different completely, like biology or something. But in the end I was just drawing and painting, and it became really important for me.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And while in art you are trying really different mediums, uh it's not only painting, but for example, uh now right in front of my eyes, your fluffy sculpture with fluffy tentacles, or you have this carnivorous plants, so you try around with materials, right?

Beáta Hechtová :

And with shapes. Yes. I I want to somehow like merge this world to like three-dimensional space, and so it's like more involved, like when you enter the exhibition space that there is some kind of like a leading point which like makes you walk through the world. I really like when exhibitions have like all together when you can merge into it. So I started to do sculptures also, and I often like put lights inside because in my paintings there is a lot of light source, like hidden light source, which is this something unknown they're trying to reach and always like try to dig it out or touch it or like find it, but they never do, you never see what it is. I don't know it myself, and that's what I also put in the sculptures a lot. A lot of them have some light inside.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

But that's very interesting. You kind of want also us to walk in this world you're creating. At the same time, I I must say it's a very complex and ambiguous world, even though there is new sensuality and new bodies and this wonderful colours, but at the same time they all balance on the edge also to be toxic, maybe, to be dangerous, attractive, but it's not a safe place for sure.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, I I guess this world has some kind of uh balance between like melancholy and danger. It's definitely not safe. Like they have to really fight for the survival, and you can see that they have to work for it, that it's not it's just not coming by itself. But the melancholy is also important that they kind of wish for something or celebrate something that's already gone, but they have this memory. For example, in the paintings I often make tattoos on the people of like some plants, which is like something like people often tattoo things which they kind of like worship or want to have closer to themselves. The time. So that's kind of the idea of like forgotten world, which is actually the world ours right now. So there is this melancholy of it. But yeah, the danger breaks it through, yeah.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And also, you have this motive of plants that also reappearing, of different plants coming with the figures in the landscape. And like, for example, in the painting with an orchid under a glass cover under a glass jar. Can you tell me more, please, about this painting?

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, so this painting was representing some kind of last plant on earth where those humanoids kind of try to protect it, so they put this glass around it and they worship it and then make all kinds of rituals around it. And this thing is just like existing, and since it's trying to survive in these hard conditions, it's transforming and being like a strange mutation process when it also almost seems like a creature, and it's inspired by this uh little prince. Yeah, this last rose on some distant planet, and this little prince is trying to do whatever it takes to save it, and everything he does is for this rose. So that's kind of the inspiration.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Also, it's very interesting how this idea of plans also is actually a very big idea in post-apocalyptic scenarios. You can see it not only in visual arts, but for example, also in literature. So, this idea of a revenge of nature, like a collective feeling of potential danger of this evolution. And also now I'm looking at your plant, which is looking like a shark, you know, so um sharp claws or teeth. So this feeling of that it would be again taking over the human progress, this nature that shall revenge.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, that's kind of the thing. But I also put in my paintings some kind of like bubble structure. I call it bubble, but it's like some liquid fluid substance with just like floating around, taking different shapes, which I also see that it could be something organic like a plant, but in the same time it could be some alienated form of energy, something like that. And that I see maybe like some new ideology which is like floating around, and it has like specific form, but that's just in the painting. But it could be just yeah, new idea or new form of thinking which is floating through it and trying to like catch up with the humanoids, and it's like in your painting handshake, right?

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Where they a little bit stretch their fingers and this kind of like fire formations because the the color is so bright, fully orange, so it has a little bit of for me personally, a little bit of this fire structure, so it's like a burning something, like a burning substance, and they're kind of stretching their fingers to say hello or right, or like this touch with something that is unknown but maybe friendly.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

We don't know, we don't know for sure. And may I ask if we'll look across the contemporary art nowadays, and because many artists, of course, think also about past uh apocalyptic scenarios and not only artists but philosophers and mathematicians and uh scientists. Whom do you like to look at? Who is somebody whom you admire or you like a certain inspiration or somebody you understand yourself in a dialogue with?

Beáta Hechtová :

Well, I get inspired by uh like uh many things. It's like this melting plot or information which I always collect and like so many little particles are inspiring to me. But one of the artists which really which I really like and I saw her solo show in LA was uh Sara Anstis. She also does these figures in this very strange landscape. She does it all with pastel and it has some really nice, touchable kind of structures. And uh what I really like that that she wrote some kind of like sci-fi stories to the exhibition that as I do with the sculptures to like help people to kind of like emerge in this world, which I built, she was doing it with the storytelling, which I really liked. And I think that's something I would love because I also did it in a past with the different like I was writing stories from the jungle and presenting it as a part of the exhibition, and I think I would like to get back to this in the future, and she was very inspiring for me through that. Another favorite artist which I like is Isabelle Arbukerge. I also saw her piece in the Jeffrey Deitch gallery when I was in LA. I saw a lot of great art in LA, but that was really good there. This was the sculpture of a woman as a deer without a hat and all fluffy with the deer skin, which also really fascinated me. I just like how she uses materiality that she changes the media like from like really shiny metal objects to like this really soft, fluffy, and that she also does human woman body mostly on this edge between like animal and human.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

It's very interesting how this qualities of being fluffy, being liquid, being shiny, I kind of always come into these futuristic scenarios. You have your fluffy tentacles. May I touch the fluff? Is it meant to be touched? So we can pat it, yeah. So it's uh interesting that uh, you know, if you really want to survive, think in direction of being fluffy, liquid, and shiny, and also maybe a little bit transparent with some nice lime green nail polish.

Beáta Hechtová :

I I really take a lot of joy when I finish the sculpture to actually brush them with the with the brush, it's so nice.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

So it's also about this tactile contact and kind of taking care, right?

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, yes, it's my little creatures, yes. Yeah, well, and another artist which I can think of is uh Clara Hosnadlova. She's a Czech artist actually, and she does this huge installations from some strange fabric cement thing mixture where she has like this viewpoints through to some like new dimension, kind of also very postapocalyptic in a sense or futuristics.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And she also has this new organic materiality to her installations. And just a question when you mentioned her name now, I thought she does this really huge installations, yeah, especially this uh solo show in Berlin. And what about you? Would you like to expand to this huge scale? Because now you work in relatively, I would call it human scale. You don't go towards these gigantic forms, but would it be any interest for you then to extend?

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, actually it is. I really like big works and big paintings where you can actually really lose yourself in the presence of it. So I really want to continue with the sculptures, and now I have actually planned like a skelet whale skeleton in like not the full thing that would be way too big, but just like parts of it, but in those parts should be actual real size of it, probably also fluffy and also some bigger formats of paintings, yeah. That's the plan now.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Wonderful. So this world shall expand, yeah. When we look at your painting, of course, we also see how technology also has transformed the world where your creatures live. We can see it as a painting coming after this digital experience.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yes, I'm definitely inspired by technology, and to me it was very interesting when I started to see, for example, the virtual reality art around, and when I was looking at this visuality of it, it seemed like very secret, like some kind of religious images, like always this like music and then the empty space and like the colours. It almost reminded me like the Baroque paintings with the pink sky and just some weird snakey creatures in the thing. So I I think there like it tries somehow to like put in our minds this like secret unknown idea of it, which I try to somehow involve into my paintings also, because some of the colours blend together, it almost seems like digital because it's like so smooth. So I try to blend this digital world and this imaginary world and real world, and to do like all these layers, like we actually have to deal with now because it's just too much from all sides.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And also you have this incredible uh effect of your object sometimes being liquid. So this liquidity, if I might say so, for example, of this object of energy, or there's you also achieve this kind of digital liquidness. When I look at some of the bodies, let's call them bodies, right? In your paintings, I feel like they're made of something what I don't know, what I don't have an experience of. So I mean this strange materiality, and also light. You said you always have this source of light, but also your light is it has this feeling of not being here, like some different sort of light, not like a sunlight, we know.

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, it's unknown source. Unknown source. But this digital kind of bubbles that you are right that they are inspired by this digitalization, that it's uh like some unknown substance I said before, which I could see that maybe like a new ideology or something, but it can also be like this whole like after the collapse that this whole technology bubble which we live in kind of like crashed into this form of something like new, like some kind of almost religious but in different form, like digital religion, which like smashed into a new ideology floating around, and we're trying to understand it, but it's much bigger than us, like AI kind of. Like I don't have any strong opinion that AI is gonna kill us or nothing. It's just very interesting to observe, and I'm just curious what happens next. And I I mean I do have in the paintings I just do all kind of brain brainstorming, where could it be, how much how abstract could it end up? Like I try to imagine the abstraction of it, but it's not like a critique or anything, it's just observation and brainstorming. But with hope, as you said, right?

Liudmila Kirsanova:

It's like observation, brainstorming, but still uh with uh hope that we will be able to navigate this new world, right? And like to find new friends, new bodies, right? And to find this new way of being, like to become a bit transparent, to become a little bit liquid, but still it's very nice that you keep for us as human beings this possibility to be sexy still in that world, to button up our silver bands. I really like it. I mean, it's just uh you know, it's a bit of a rock and roll that you add no can can you be like a rock star in that world in your silver bands? I like it with uh neon green spikes on your back, right?

Beáta Hechtová :

Great.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And may I ask, do you want to live in the world that you create?

Beáta Hechtová :

Yeah, that's a good question. I think maybe yes. Maybe that's my problem. I'm just like that world more than the real world. I'm just bored with my physical form, maybe I just like to be transparent or liquid. No, I actually do crave some kind of adventure and survival and danger, and I do kind of want to reconnect in some sense. Yes, maybe I would like to try it out for sure. Maybe I did in a way for me. Maybe I want to get back to it, and that's why I painted.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Beáta, thank you very much for the talk. I mean, just to be here in your studio, to be surrounded by that. It's already there's they have some magnetism, your your works, you know. They are somehow I also want to live in that world, even though I really love uh also the place where I am and what I am, and but they have this enchanting beauty, you know, and also I must say, some sort of music to them, some sort of sound. This world is not silent, it has a sound in it, and you can see it, you can feel it. Maybe it's different because you know, when everything is transparent and liquid, and maybe we walk and move in this world in a very different way, it's also not only full of light, but also full of sound.

Beáta Hechtová :

Interesting. I mean, I was already thinking into adding some sound installations to my exhibition. So you wonder how you confirmed it that it may be necessary for the future. I look at it as a story, it goes on, it's just evolving.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Thank you very much, and uh, we are looking forward to the new chapters of this story. Thank you.