Klára Latta - Mountain of Skulls

In Mountain of Skulls, Klára Latta collapses the language of landscape, memory, and digital distance into a single haunting composition. A mound of smoothed stone-like forms reveals, on closer inspection, embedded human skulls—some distinct, others fading into the surface like corrupted pixels. Above the mound floats a boxed-in figure, cropped and isolated, as if pulled from a paused cutscene or forgotten game file. Their disembodied hands perform an unclear gesture—part instruction, part manipulation.

The isometric rigidity drawn from 1990s computer game aesthetics is here disrupted by painterly haze. The result is a visual terrain both scenic and suspended: a ruin without a timeline, a terrain without scale. The skulls do not scream; they accumulate. This is not a depiction of horror, but of quiet, mechanical repetition—the kind that builds mountains out of memories and deletes their meaning. Latta’s work doesn’t narrate what happened. It simply asks: who placed the last one on the pile? And who’s still watching?

This piece was featured in Best of AVU, Summer 2025 at HIDDEN Gallery—a curated showcase of standout works by emerging students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.