Lenka Konopasek was born in the Czech Republic where she attended School of Applied Arts in Prague. After immigrating to the United States, she received BFA degree from University of Utah and MFA degree from Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. She attended artist residencies in Vermont Studio Center, Chicago Art Institute and Little Falls, Minnesota.
Her paintings have been exhibited widely throughout United States, Taiwan, Germany, India and Czech Republic. She also completed several large public art projects in Utah. Her work has been featured on the back cover of the New American Painting and in other publications.
She has been teaching at University of Utah and Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

I like to use photographic documentation as reference material for my paintings to represent a single fragment of life frozen in time. The moment, when few seconds seem a lifetime. The photos show the essence of movement, a quick glance, losing one’s grip, losing control in shimmering colors making the shapes to dissipate into the air. The flash of the camera flattens the image, smudges the edges of shapes while pulling out certain details catching the actor in a primal moment of fear. Looking at the pictures later they are affirmation: we were here. This was I. This was once important to me.

These paintings represent much more than just the act of Rodeo. They reflect the changes in the American West, the slowly dying Americana, which is now represented more in the movies or as a myth, becoming more and more kitsch, a selling gimmick like the Marlboro Man.

I am interested in the images of the cowboys falling rather than in the glorious eight seconds on the top. The moment when the rider hangs suspended in the air, fractions of a second before he crumbles down in defeat. The poses the camera catches are puppet like, disjointed and comical not that of a strong man’s body in charge of his destiny. He becomes vulnerable and breakable. It is a moment of open possibilities, full of disbelief and unreality.