Klara Kristalova was born in Prague, former Czechoslovakia in 1967, and moved to Sweden with her parents when she was only one year old. She studied at the Royal University College of Fine Art in Stockholm and now lives in Norrtälje, Sweden.
Kristalova builds a dark, strange and yet familiar universe. The characters that populate her world are strange, lonely, quiet, perhaps lost, as if they have just escaped from a cruel tale, waiting for a passer-by to stop and show them the way. Made of glazed ceramic, Kristalova's figures carry a raw, vulnerable humanity. Drawing on Nordic stories and traditional myths, Kristalova succeeds in conveying basic human emotions, such as fear, love, sadness and guilt, which emerge from her work like memories of our own childhood. Landscape is an essential element in Klara Kristalova's mental and physical universe, without being a theme in itself. It appears in fragments in her drawings, ceramic sculptures and bronzes that populate the exhibitions she has conceived in recent years.