Blanka Jakubčíková (b. 1971) is an artist of vigorous gestures and radical attitudes. Her artistic personality was formed during her studies in architecture and then at the newly founded Faculty of Architecture at the studio of Professor Václav Stratil in Brno (1992-2000). However, she soon embarked on her own path, where her artistic and poetic work intersect, and the image and the text form one dense mass of communication. 
Blanka is an artist full of passions and contradictions. She draws the contours of her femme fatale beauties in a glamorous, almost Art Nouveau line, only to whip their maternally lush bodies with a flurry of expressive brushstrokes and disgrace them with splashes of dripping paint. To leave no one in any doubt that this is where the drama takes place, the painting is accompanied by inscriptions that move it towards the comic book on the border between "morzacor" and the red library. In this way, he consciously and humorously teeters on the edge between decadence and banality, clearly enjoying his walk on this thin ice. With ease, he mixes raw, art-brutal expression with elegant calligraphy, sacred motifs with fairground aesthetics, decadent tabloid with sublime pathos.

The title of the exhibition If Beauty Killed was created under the impression of the accident Blanka experienced - and survived - on 3 December 2013. On a motorway in Germany, a car full of people skidded at 140 kilometres and flipped onto its roof. "As it was turning, I lost consciousness and saw the image of a beautiful woman. She was wearing a red dress covered with white roses. Her hair was white too, long to her ankles. I have never seen a more beautiful woman. I think I saw death itself," she noted. But this time, beauty didn't kill - miraculously, everyone survived without consequence. "I'm the girl who hacked death itself," Blanka boasted in one of her Facebook poems. The experience of the car crash was originally supposed to be the leitmotif of the exhibition. In the end, however, it was reflected only in the first painting depicting a stylized figure of a "beautiful death" in a red dress and in the last painting representing the artist's "car"-a portrait with the body of the crashed car embedded in her head. 
"Death - what didn't happen - hurts," she says in another poem: and that's why this time she decided to leave nothing to chance and create a monument to murders that actually happened - whether real or imaginary. For Blanka Jakubčíková, death is an eternal fascination with a strongly eroticising charge. But not just any death: she is excited by a passionate and not entirely natural death - murder, if possible. She conceived of her series of large-scale comic paintings, which she created on site at the Kabinet T. gallery, as one coherent concept, where the individual paintings function as part of a multi-layered story that the viewer can compose in different directions. Building on her previous project, Woman is a pronounced criminal type, she plays with coincidence (if we allow that there is such a thing), quoting herself to piece together a universal story of love, hate and revenge.

One of her impulses was the discovery of a year-old magazine, Týden, which commemorated the 40th anniversary of the massacre committed by twenty-two-year-old Olga Hepnarová on 10 July 1973, the day of the opening, when she deliberately drove her rented truck onto a tram island and left eight dead bodies behind. She declared her act as revenge on the society that had treated her bestially throughout her life. Opposite Hepnarová, who was the last Czech woman sentenced to death, Jakubčíková placed a portrait of Marie Sonbolová, who cut the throat of her daughter Sandra with a carpet knife. Her murder "out of love" had a messianic motive: the mother wanted to put the mentally ill girl out of her earthly suffering. 
Blanka Jakubčíková's murderers are not just names from the black chronicles: they are femme fatales - women convinced of their higher calling, - goddesses of vengeance, self-proclaimed saviours and martyrs of their own faith. In the exhibition, they are in good company with the atomic Madonnas determined to cause a nuclear catastrophe in the name of jealousy, and with the alter-ego of an artist ready to "cut someone's head off with a thorn from a rose" - a paraphrase of her neo-decadent poetry collection published under the pseudonym Blanche Cutie.

Like Olga or Marie, Blanche openly confesses: At the scene of the crime, where she has devoted herself to her mission with truly total commitment, she leaves the murderous paraphernalia, her own improvised bed with a bloodstained comforter where the sleeping person's heart used to be, stained with plastic, on which, like "lipstick on a mirror," she inscribes messages to those who come to look for the remains. She leaves behind a complex installation somewhat in the style of Young British Artists' Tracey Emin's Beds and Rooms, an installation where screamed intimacy becomes a generalised experience. 
She deserves no mercy - if only because it's the last thing she would beg for. After all, what mercy for a murderess who doesn't even wash the floor properly. For Blanka Jakubčíková, murder is clearly more than just a "beautiful art". Let's beware of her.