Erika Bornova is among the younger members of the generation of the 1980s, an artistic circle whose most expressive representatives now figure prominently on the well-established Czech art scene. The group originated in l984, when students from Prague art schools began organizing the unofficial Konfrontace (Confrontations) exhibitions. 
At that time, female artists were so poorly regarded that no one questioned why they were not included in the group's initial exhibitions. That situation did not change until the third Konfrontace exhibit, which was held at a Kladno residence owned by the parents of Magdalena Rajnišová, a schoolmate of Erika Bornová's, and a fact that probably helped open the way for Erika Bornová to participate in the show. The inclusion of her work in that show was pivotal for the role of women in contemporary Czech art, because the Konfrontace exhibitions had succeeded in shaking off the artistic greyness of those days and had become a vivid platform for discussion and a great motivation for artistic creation. Her participation in the show helped lay one of the cornerstones for the integration of Czech female artists into exhibitions and other public activities which now, ten years later, are commonplace for the generation of artists coming of age in the 1990s.
The artistic atmosphere of the first half of the 1980s fostered a period of wildly expressive painting for Erika Bornová, but she soon found the more strenuous and refined figurative style that has become her hallmark. In the 1980s, Postmodern theories began permeating the contemporary 
Czech arts scene, making the animal, mythological and fairy-tale motifs that became the main subjects of Bornová's paintings contextually relevant to current art theory. Those themes were later included in her sculptures, although the sculptures were closer in subject to the Czech tradition of the grotesque, present in the works of the older generation - sculptor Kurt Gebauer or painter Jiri Sopko - rather than Post-modernism. Other artists in her circle, such as Jaroslav Róna and Petr Nikl, used similar motifs in their work. Such fanciful motifs seemed appropriate to Bornová's work, since they continued an an artistic tradition started by her father, Adolf Born, who is well-known for his illustrations of fairy-tale books and popular cartoons. Since her childhood, Bornová had lived in an artistic environment built around the creation of imaginative fairy-tale images and characters. Such an environment certainly helped to amplify the quality of her craftsmanship and fostered her later taste for employing non-traditional materials, especially in sculpture.
Sculpture has always been an integral part of Erika Bornová's work. Her earliest sculptures were often created from old furniture - chairs or stools - that she wrapped in textile, fixed with mastic, and then coloured. In that way, she created such figurative sculptures as Animal (1987), 
a three-legged being, somewhere between a pig and a dog, that is swallowing another creature; Dwarf (1989), a seated figure with a look of surprise on its face and on whose hand sits a white-fur seal that looks like a bird; and Queen (1989), a majestic cat-like sphinx with a strange crown on her head.
Concerns for her own family (she has two children) have slowed down Bornova's later work, and led her to embrace purely female themes, such as the lace series of portraits of models accompanied by kitchen supplies (1993). In that series, she expressed the dilemma of a young mother, a woman overseeing a home and playing the role of a housekeeper while at the same time tending to her husband as a new wife - Bornová is married to painter Tomáš Císařovský. While she was working on the portraits, she was also creating the life-size Bony Cow sculpture. The animal is stepping forward on slender legs, one leg extended as it takes a step, and has golden hair made of maize and milled paprika, chocolate eyes and wax horns. That sculpture represents a shift in the style of expression fueling Bornová's work, a shift that has become more obvious over the past two years as Bornová's relationship to the depicted figures has become more fact-based. Her sculpture, Swing, may at first glance be reminiscent of Mike Kelley's installations, but upon closer analysis the viewer is taken aback by the bizarre suggestiveness of the surreal compilation of baby toys. The latest sculpture, Ram, confirms that figures are the strongest subjects of this gifted Czech sculptress.
text by Marta Smolíková
translated by Lucie Vidmarová
on the pages of Erika Bornová were used photographs of Vladimír Goralčík and Pavel Hron