The exhibition “4 and a Half Series” presents selected works by Jitka Svobodová from the past seven years. Svobodová entered the Czech art scene at the close of the 1960s and start of the 1970s as a graduate of the Monumental Painting Studio run by Arnošt Paderlík at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts (where she studied from 1961–1967). From the beginning of her career she has acted as a solitary figure in the local arts context, not just from the perspective of her personal approach to the medium of drawing and specific themes, but also as a consequence of historical circumstances. Many figures from that young generation, including most of Svobodová’s fellow pupils, emigrated after August 1968, and despite brief visits home after the regime change, those artists have remained settled abroad. Svobodová, therefore, belongs to the “lost generation”, which was indirectly forced, under the influence of events, to develop at the beginning of their creative lives in seclusion, which naturally led them to take up their own particular stances. In the case of Svobodová, what also contributed to her position was the fact that she did not become a member of any of the art groups that were dynamically engaged under those conditions (at least for a brief time), but began her career at a time when many groups closed down their activities as a consequence of the normalization era and did not begin to organize themselves again until the second half of the 1980s. Svobodová was also not part of the circle of women artists whose creations were of interest to Jindřich Chalupecký. After receiving her diploma, Svobodová dedicated herself to freeform art, but as a consequence of the deteriorating political situation, in 1973 she began her post-graduate studies in the restoration of artworks, a field that became a refuge for unofficial artists and provided her a means of making a living until the Velvet Revolution. In 1974, after a beginning period as a painter, she began to veer toward working in pencil in order to save time. Gradually, her drawings captured the elements necessary to her work as a restorer, for example, boards, coiled wire, ladders and taut ropes, subjects that for the first time actually became connected with this particular artist and, at the same time, were a testament to the tensions of the 1970s, embodied in the everyday facts of her marginalized life. Her first major exhibition was held in 1977 at Mlynářka. It was open for two days only and was held in a building slated for emolition. She exhibited there together with the Czech Constructivist Stanislav Zipp.
Under these conditions, her own language developed. She discovered the topic of capturing everyday reality by showing things in their elementary form. The austerity of her materials, the curtness of her expression, and her absolute reduction of things to their essence helps her express her ideas more concisely. Drawing serves, in her hands, a deictic function – it points to a specific thing and awakens it to existence through the very gesture of choosing to portray it. What is presented to us about it as constant and unchanging also demonstrates the uniqueness of the thing itself. At the same time, her design ignores basic physical properties of space and does not subject her presentation to the laws of geometric perspective. What lies behind her interest in detail, in monumental space, and the occasionally almost technical tone of her drawings is partially the fact that she had access to architecture in early age thanks to her extended family. Her mother’s cousin several times removed was Vladimír Wallenfels, who is, for example, the co-author of the original design for the House of Art in Ostrava. It is also worth mentioning her brief stay as a child in Poděbrady toward the end of the Second World War, at which time she lived in a Functionalist building. The rounded corners of the railings there are reminiscent of her later works featuring rounded, twisted ropes (e.g., Taut Ropes, 1979). Compared to the time she spent in the Art Nouveau apartment building in Prague built by her great-grandfather Antonín Dvořák on her father’s side, the stay in the Functionalist building was certainly a contrast as an aesthetic experience. Dvořák was the builder of the Water Tower in the Vinohrady neighborhood of Prague, across from the Art Nouveau building just mentioned, where Svobodová has lived since childhood and where she has had her studio in the attic since 1967. Her first drawings with pencil were created there
against a backdrop of artificially-produced, gridlined paper, and ultimately even her later thematic series capture various building and construction-related elements and solutions. An example of such work, and also her first more radical drawing, is Window of 1974. This represents the view from her studio of the opposite wall and is one of her first drawings in a bigger format. The work was exhibited at her solo exhibition “Drawings” in 1982 on the second floor of the Old Town Hall, which at that time formed exhibition premises of Prague City Gallery. In addition to her earlier small-scale drawings of figural and natural motifs from the end of the 1960s it featured her large-scale works with their motifs of auxiliary and construction materials. The exhibition was a surprise in terms of theme and at the beginning of the 1980s appeared to be something new. After the previous tense decade, it was, after a long hiatus, a project representing the art of the young generation.
From the perspective of the motif of everyday objects expanding themselves across the space of the paper, these drawings are reminiscent of the legacy of Arte Povera, including the work with graphite as a natural, original material. Svobodová worked intensively in pencil until 1996 when, while working on the motif of eyes for an exhibition in Ostrava, she attempted pastels; one of those first eyes was also exhibited at the New Zlín Salon that same year. Color, therefore, gradually returned to her images, and inscribed itself automatically into her work with the background spaces as well, with the harsh-seeming, intensive scraping of the pencil being replaced by a shallow space created by pastels. In her series of objects of kitchen equipment (approximately from 1997 to 2008) pastels became her definitive medium.
The current exhibition presents her most recent sets, drawn already exclusively with pastels, namely, Smoke, Tables, Curtains, Dwellings (in combination with wire) and the beginning of a series that remains untitled for now. At the center of interest remains her characteristically concentrated work with commonplace items and scenes we encounter every day. The drawings are faithful renditions, but Svobodová systematically simplifies them until they reach the level of representation. The drawings come about by spreading on a first, expressive layer of pastel and seeking a color tone that is convenient to her purpose, i.e., the color is wiped on until it achieves a certain desired intensity. This procedure, during which we follow basically just a part of the original transcription of the object, creates the impression of an open process. Its intention is not to touch the complete material existence of these objects, but to exploit the ordinary objects as a means of seeing.
This particular exhibition absolutely ignores the artist’s wire sculptures and concentrates exclusively on the medium of drawing in two dimensions. Another component is a series of timeless photographs by Markéta Othová, taken in Svobodová’s studio especially for this exhibition. Visitors, however, encounter just one randomly-selected photo, a copy of which is given to them when they buy a ticket. It is up to the viewer’s perceptiveness whether to combine the context of the photograph with the exhibition or whether to absolutely ignore this reality.
Text by Monika Čejková
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4 and a Half Series” is a solo show of Svobodová’s work after a long hiatus and is happening as part of the New Zlín Salon. After 1989 Svobodová contributed to the first three triennales and is returning to Zlín after a 15-year break.
Curators:
Monika Čejková
Full exhibition
12/5–16/7 2017, Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín, Zlín – Czech Rep.
