Playlist Q10
Sculptor Erika Bornová and painter Tomáš Císařovský are both prominent artists of their generation and life partners. For Playlist Q they have chosen their favourite authors and performers, from Jiří Suchý to Janis Joplin.
Sculptor Erika Bornová and painter Tomáš Císařovský are both prominent artists of their generation and life partners. For Playlist Q they have chosen their favourite authors and performers, from Jiří Suchý to Janis Joplin.
A charismatic jack of all trades, magician straddling the line between amateur and professional photography, balancing between craft and artistic ambition. Josef Chuchma deems that K. O. Hrubý’s voluminous, varied and erratic work could be gathered into different exhibitions or series of books. An attempt to grasp the legacy of Karel Otto Hrubý can be seen at the House of Photography.
Although Karel Otto Hrubý was a fixture of Czech photography and the local photographic scene for decades, his work was only fully appreciated in 2017, when one hundred and one years had passed since his birth. At that time, the House of Arts in Brno prepared an exhibition and also contributed to the publication of a monograph summarising the creative, organisational and educational contribution of “K. O. H.”, the acronym by which the artist was well known in his day. In March 2018, the retrospective came to an end, and, almost exactly five years later to the day, its Prague version was launched, with Lukáš Bártl, Antonín Dufek and Jana Vránová as the main curators. They took part in the Brno premiere, but this year is not a reproduction, a simple reprise, but a selection adapted for the two-storey premises of GHMP’s House of Photography in Revoluční Street.
On Many Fronts
Karel Otto Hrubý was active as a photographer, teacher, lecturer, curator, organiser, publicist and critic. Within the history of Czech photography, perhaps only Vladimír Birgus (b. 1954), who for more than four decades has managed to simultaneously carry out most of the activities in which Karel Otto Hrubý was fully immersed, can match him. Hrubý was born in Vienna in 1916, but graduated from the grammar school in Znojmo and went to Prague to study law at Charles University, although he did not complete his studies due to the forced closure of universities after the Nazi occupation. He moved to Brno and earned a living as a jazz musician until he was pressed into forced labour in 1941. Simultaneously – and with increasing seriousness! – he also took up photography, which became his main occupation after the war. He first worked at the Rovnost daily newspaper, then as a cinematographer for documentary and advertising films, as a theatre photographer and, in 1951, he was again employed in the press – this time at the Prague-based Květy magazine. But Hrubý’s stay in the capital did not last long. The very next year he took the opportunity to teach photography at the Brno Secondary School of Arts and Crafts. He worked there until 1977 when he suffered a heart attack. He recovered, moved to Senotín in South Bohemia, slowed down his hectic pace, turned to painting and “forgot” about photography and the activities surrounding it in which he excelled. He died in 1998.
In his monograph Karel Otto Hrubý – Photographer, Educator, Theorist (2017), curator and theorist Jiří Pátek notes that after 1978, “not a single line” can be found from this industrious writer, who for twenty years wrote reviews for the monthly Československá fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography). According to Pátek, “he was able to express himself in a lively language, he was witty, gracious and, when appropriate, ironic”. On a personal note: as the son of a father who used to regularly buy the magazine, read it and underline passages that were important to him, I remember seeing the name of Karel Otto Hrubý for the first time when I also started reading the Czechoslovak Photography magazine in my younger years – many of the passages my had father underlined were found in K. O. H.’s articles.
A True Son of His Era
According to surviving witnesses, Karel Otto Hrubý had personal charisma, was a skilful communicator, and could almost magically straddle the line between amateur and professional photography, which in Czechoslovakia was otherwise a specific divide – on the one hand, professionals in the media or advertising, plus a few artistic photographers, and on the other hand, amateurs, many of whom did not go beyond the level of “hobby art”. But at the same time, there were also artists in this category who did not make a living from photography, but “as a pastime” they were constantly focused on creating their work, which is more valuable today than the purposive products of the professionals of the time (see the work of Bohdan Holomíček, Viktor Kolář, Gustav Aulehla and some other “amateurs”).
Browsing through the photographic works in the above-mentioned book, Karel Otto Hrubý – Photographer, Educator, Theorist, one cannot help but notice that even “in practice” Hrubý maintained a balance between skilled craft and fine art photography with artistic ambitions. Some of his pictures are prime examples of socialist realism. When the most horrific period of Stalinism was over, some artists, in Czech poetry as well as in photography, Hrubý among them, turned to de-ideologised everyday themes and to civilism. Karel Otto Hrubý responded to yet another call of the times in the sixties when he created, among other things, staged photographs; in addition to these, he also created around fifty collages. On top of that, he also liked to travel and take pictures of rural and urban landscapes; in fact, together with Antonín Hinšt, he published an educational book, Krajinářská fotografie (Landscape Photography), in 1974. Karel Otto Hrubý also independently prepared two publications focused on two specific locations in the early 1960s: Brno and Vysočinou po řece Jihlavě.
His work is voluminous, varied and – erratic, or one could say – very much tied to the era in which it originated. It could be gathered into quite a different exhibition or series of books. One of them could comprise socialist realist studies of scenes from factories and villages. Another could be civilist, featuring snapshots. Yet another grouping could be made of landscape works and artoriented work. All of them would represent Karel Otto Hrubý, but always in a reduced way; each would never “truly” be all of him. For there is no “true” core to the work of Karel Otto Hrubý. Therefore, anyone wanting to provide a relatively truthful account of him is faced with the difficult task of interpretive selection, which should not ignore the selfserving features in the artist’s work, and, at the same time, his more or less successful efforts to keep his creative expression up to the standards of his time.
One basic feature arches over all this – Hrubý was a traditionalist. He worked with black-and-white material, he paid attention to quality technical processing and to the “golden rules” of composition. He in no way questioned the representational fidelity of the photographic medium; he did not work with a concept in which photographs refer to a certain phenomenon with varying degrees of sophistication. The above- quoted Jiří Pátek aptly reminds us that in his reviews, K. O. H. had a negative attitude towards two Brno exhibitions (1969, 1975) by Jan Svoboda, now considered something of a classic, whose minimalist, (self-)reflective and philosophical still lifes and photographs of the most ordinary objects, works whose grey tonality was inspired by Cézanne’s theory of tonal colour, Hrubý was unable to accept. He described them as “grey, pushed, pulled or unevenly lit enlargements”.
Presenting the work of Karel Otto Hrubý is therefore a challenge. How the curators have approached his legacy in 2023 can be discovered at the House of Photography until 21 May.
The post-war art of the former Yugoslavia did not have a chance to build on the pre-war first avant-garde. The work of the Serbian artist Dragoljub Raša Todosijević (* 1945) works with modernist concepts and symbols of 20th century totalitarian thought. How does their reflection look, blurred by the fluidity of global development?
Looking at the Serbian avant-garde through the lens of the Central European avantgarde, such a title might seem provocative at the very least, especially when talking about an artist working in the second half of the twentieth century. However, during Todosijević’s studies at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts in the second half of the 1960s, the prevailing approaches in art education were completely non-progressive, not in the sense of socialist realism, but rather of formally late-modernist painting with ideological content related to the history of the construction of Yugoslavia. However progressive the then higher education environment there was in comparison to what existed in our country, it was highly selective in relation to historical influences. Post-war Yugoslav art had little chance to build on the pre-war first avant-garde, and moreover, the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts was the central art school in the capital of the entire federation at the time, which gave it the lustre of being responsible for educating artists in the interests of the state.
For many years, the ideological violence artificially maintained by the tradition of late modernist painting gradually created a new form of state art – a kind of liberal socialist realism – and at the same time, made it impossible to come to terms with pre-war art through a more or less continuous connection with the first Yugoslav interwar avant-garde. It is worth mentioning here one of Todosijević’s most famous early works: a performance he created in the 1970s entitled Was ist Kunst? In this performance, he asks his assistant, his own wife, a single question: “Was ist Kunst?”, i.e., “what is art?”, while smearing black paint over her face with his hands. The diction and emphasis with which the question is asked, however, intensify during the performance, and the urgency of the question begins to resemble a police interrogation, which continues until the interrogator, i.e., the artist himself, loses his voice. The question thus becomes a reassertion of the avant-garde’s moral claim on the work of art, but under completely different political conditions. At the same time, it becomes a great challenge to and questioning of art. It is thus a paradox that at the moment the avant-garde comes into being, art is already different and only adopts the means that make it avant-garde.
As a result of the constant challenge to art in Raša Todosijević’s practice and of the dramatic and drastic transformations of the world that he experiences and observes in his life, established symbols and their meanings have been fundamentally deflected in his thinking. The experience of the sheer fluidity of global development has blurred the lines of reading symbols in Raša’s work, as can be seen in the specific example of the swastika, which symbolises the totalitarian political thought of the first half of the twentieth century. But equally, this sign can also be one of the symbols representing pure modernism with its belief in progress, however much interpretative violence is involved. Either way, Todosijević, like other artistic groups originating from the region of former Yugoslavia, leaves us alone with our doubts about what such a symbol, taken out of context, can actually mean. It may well be that the exhibition will bring together diverse groups of visitors for whom this symbol will answer, each in a completely different way, the questions they pose to art, our world and our present.
The avant-gardist Todosijević, whose work adopts an avant-garde modernist form, is entirely postmodern, both intrinsically and in terms of his content. His work is therefore in a paradoxical situation and represents a specific transitional position. It replicates the world-changing rupture of the end of modernism and the manifold consequences of this end, which by far do not relate only to art itself; similarly, Raša’s art constantly oscillates between simultaneous affirmation and self-demolition.
In the second half of the 1960s, Belgrade became an extraordinary place on the then map of Europe, attracting the attention of the cultural, artistic and intellectual worlds in both East and West.
Yugoslavia, independent of the Soviet bloc, was developing a distinct and, as it seemed at the time, much freer system of so-called self-managed socialism. Although Tito’s regime also had its dissidents, such as the former high-ranking official Milovan Djilas, and imprisoned many of its political opponents, it allowed considerable creative freedom, especially during the 1960s. Within the relatively broad framework defined by Marxist ideology, there was room for artistic experimentation and provocative exploration of the boundaries of what was politically permissible.
The conflict between Stalin and Tito, which erupted in 1948, resulted in the detachment of Yugoslavia from the Soviet orbit of power and ideology. In an attempt to distinguish themselves from the Soviet type of socialism, the Yugoslav communists embarked on a path of political experimentation aimed at returning the socialist project to its emancipatory and free-thinking content and ridding it of the silt of Stalinist deformation. This trend also affected the field of art and culture. Already in the early 1950s, socialist realism was rejected in Yugoslavia. Space was opened for modern artistic movements and artists were given more freedom to express their critical attitudes towards the existing reality. Isolated from the Soviet bloc from the time of the rupture, Yugoslavia began to orient itself towards the West. Information and impulses were exchanged relatively freely, and Yugoslavia was not only a recipient of them, but increasingly became a distinctive and innovative centre in the eyes of the world public in a number of fields, in philosophy, film, literature and the visual arts. Yugoslavia thus naturally participated in global trends that most of the socialist countries of the Soviet bloc struggled to keep up with. Yugoslavia also had the advantage over the Eastern bloc countries of allowing its citizens, as early as in the late 1950s, to travel freely, to study at Western universities and even to stay in these countries for prolonged periods of time and then return.
A group of philosophers around the Zagreb-based Praxis magazine, such as Predrag Vranicki, Rudi Supek and Gajo Petrović, helped to shape the international debate in the field of Marxist theory, subjecting to analysis and critique both Western societies and Leninist-Stalinist power practices, the manifestations of which even Tito’s Yugoslavia could not get rid of, despite its proclaimed liberalisation. The Korčulan Summer School, organised by the Praxis circle, brought together philosophers from both sides of the divided world. Yugoslav literature also received a favourable response in global terms. Members of the post-war generation joined the success of Miroslav Krleža and Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963. In their novels, Dobrica Ćosić, Antonije Isaković and Branko Ćopić broke taboos about the partisan resistance and the early Stalinist phase of Yugoslav socialism. Even slightly younger authors, such as Miodrag Bulatović and Mirko Kovač, experimented with literary form. The so-called Black Wave directors dominated the film industry. Aleksandar Petrović was successful at international festivals with his films Three (1965) and The Feather Gatherers/I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967). Živojin Pavlović’s When I’m Dead and Gone and The Rats Woke Up (both 1967) held up an unflattering mirror to the socialist reality of the time by observing the miserable lives of people on the margins of society. Another Black Wave director, Dušan Makavejev, took an even more provocative approach, combining, with some exaggeration, Marxism, psychoanalysis and personal intimacy with the language of “objective” science in an avant-garde cinematic language (Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, 1967). Unlike in the countries of the Soviet bloc, where modernism had to struggle with the dominant socialist realism during the period of destalinisation, expression and abstraction in art, used to celebrate the victorious revolution, had already become mainstream in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Young artists set themselves against them, especially those with politically provocative content, as was the case with the painter Mića Popović.
In Yugoslavia, as in other socialist countries, the tendency to provoke and experiment was motivated by a desire for greater freedom of thought and creation. In Yugoslavia, however, this tendency was quite clearly anchored in the existing left-wing project of the second half of the 1960s. Critics among artists and intellectuals pretended to take the regime at its word and demanded that it fulfil its promises, i.e. that socialism should bring both social justice and the attainment of the freedom of the human individual. Yugoslavia was swept by a student revolt in 1968, which found its strongest expression at the university in the capital. As in the countries of Western Europe, this movement grew out of the radical left intellectually. It criticised the existing regime as the rule of the “red bourgeoisie”. It attacked the privileges of the new social elite and persistent or even entirely new forms of social inequality, as well as manifestations of authoritarianism and the suppression of freedom of expression.
But Tito’s regime soon neutralised the movement. It used the lesson of 1968 to turn away from the liberal trend and towards a reinforcement of authoritarian modes of governance and a conservative turn in both ideology and culture. There was also outright persecution, as in the case of director Lazar Stojanović, whose highly provocative 1971 film Plastic Jesus was soon banned and its author sentenced to three years in prison. Similarly, Dušan Makavejev’s equally provocative film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) was also banned. Makavejev and Želimir Žilnik, another Black Wave director, subsequently left to work abroad.
The intellectual climate of the late 1960s and the rise and failure of the 1968 student movement eventually gave rise to the generation of artists to which Raša Todosijević belongs. He, along with Marina Abramović, Era Milivojević and others, formed a group in 1969 that operated out of the Student Cultural Centre, a surviving product of the previous “revolutionary” year. On the domestic scene, these new conceptual artists represented an extreme alternative, which the official structures definitely did not favour, manifesting their attitude not through direct bans or persecution but through a lack of financial and existential support. Nevertheless, during the conservative turn, the group was able to create, travel, exhibit both in their own country and abroad, and maintain foreign contacts. In 1973, it presented itself successfully at the Edinburgh Art Festival, and the following year its members were able to invite Joseph Beuys, for example, to the April Meetings they organised in Belgrade. Todosijević, like Marina Abramović, spent more time abroad than in Yugoslavia from the mid 1970s, but quite legally, with a Yugoslav passport, with which one could travel to most countries in the world without a visa. Maintaining a critical distance from the domestic artistic, cultural and political establishment did not put you in the spotlight in Yugoslavia, but nor did it lead to internal or external emigration. In this respect, even in the conservative 1970s, the difference between Yugoslavia and, for example, Czechoslovakia was quite fundamental. This context also goes some way to explaining how Yugoslav artists like Raša Todosijević were able to participate in the most up-to-date developments in world art of the period.
In the 1990s, Todosijević and his circle took anti-war and anti-nationalist positions, again representing the opposition and the alternative, as they still do today. Today, however, it would be difficult for an artist from any of the countries of the former Yugoslavia to achieve the same level of global success. Yugoslavia, which had a respected status, has disappeared, and the successor states are again regarded by Western capitals as exotic and peripheral, where some incomprehensible horrors happened and are happening, with which the “developed world” has nothing to do. The West is interested in artists and authors who elaborate on Western stereotypes of the Balkans and, in a way, reinforce them. On the contrary, Todisijević, Marina Abramović or Slovenian band Laibach (also inspired by Todosijević) or the philosopher Slavoj Žižek became interesting not because they came from some “odd” country but because they dealt with general themes of the contemporary world.
Depth, not breadth, is the method Jitka Svobodová uses in her work, notes art historian Hana Hlaváčková.
One can consider oneself truly lucky if one has the opportunity to see almost the entirety of Jitka Svobodová’s work together in one place. This vast body of work is – in its diversity – very complex. The changes in it, whether in the technique used (there are not many of them) or in its transformations, from the natural to objects made by the human hand, from paper and textile surfaces to the elements and cosmic phenomena, are never random or triggered by an external stimulus alone. They represent a gradual exploration of our world, our living environment, and they evolve only within the framework of this fundamental issue. Permeating everything is the artist’s probing gaze, with the same laconic question: what does this thing, this phenomenon, mean? What is the thing in itself? The artist does not explore the environment of our life as a whole, aware of its complexity. She explores it in confrontation with each individual thing she encounters. Over and over again she makes a drawing of a hose, a pillow, a curtain, a tablecloth, thin tree trunks. Jitka Svobodová expressed herself through painting only initially, during her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and shortly afterwards. Even then, however, her colours did not tend towards the illusory, their condensed earthiness creating something other: an unbounded materiality. Already here, the tendency to paint not the illusory visual reality, but only those of its qualities that are actually unrepresentable, becomes apparent. From the rocky ground, embryonic faces emerge only furtively, as if during the creation of the world. Soon, however, colours disappear completely and the artist works only with drawing with which she is able to express everything she is interested in: objects, whose special properties she explores: their heft, flatness, flexibility, but also their hollowness and emptiness. She has permanently devoted herself to some of these qualities, and they feature in her most recent paintings with textiles and fabrics.
In 1978, Jitka Svobodová had an exhibition in Český Těšín. I wrote the text for the catalogue and my colleague Pavel Zatloukal wrote the text for the exhibition itself. I was very surprised that Zatloukal mentioned in his text something that he had discovered and which I had not noticed: he sensed obstacles, inhibitions in communication that I could not discover myself because they were also my own obstacles, my own inhibitions, through which I struggle with the world, and therefore seemed quite natural to me. But these inhibitions are also obstacles that prevent the author from being distracted by the perceptual richness of the world and lead to a deep focus on a particular detail and, at the same time, a particular aspect of it through which the world can be recognised more deeply. Depth, not breadth, is the method Jitka Svobodová uses in her work. However, there is another, somewhat surprising line in the artist’s work, which complements the pictures drawn. These are objects, again minimalistically formed only of wire and paper matter. But the theme of these objects is completely different: the sun, the wind (trees in the wind), fire (candles). Thus, again, the unrepresentable but fundamentally quite different world of elements, through which she reveals a different aspect of existence. Jitka thinks through images while exploring her place in the world through them. She explores the full virtue (arete) of individual objects not in their functionality, but as things in themselves. In agreement with this, she reduces space from infinity to the Aristotelian place of things. Even empty space is elaborated with subtle drawing (the coiled hose, the hollowness of vessels). The materiality of her first paintings is thematised again in her most recent works, where the weight of the stone that makes up the primordial world is transformed into a light, soft drapery that simultaneously envelops and conceals. Jitka Svobodová’s work is the subject of an interesting and comprehensive publication prepared with great insight by Karel Srp last year, which also includes short essays by other authors. Jitka Svobodová’s work, although simple at first glance, is in fact a philosophical treatise. It therefore requires focused attention, but it enriches us greatly.
The pencil and pastel drawings and delicate objects made by Jitka Svobodová (82) need space and, at the same time, a certain intimacy, notes Helena Musilová, curator of the exhibition entitled Beyond the Edge of the Visible. The very first retrospective exhibition of the legendary artist offers an experience of concentration – both in the work of the artist and as an experience for the audience.
The work of artist, draughtswoman, painter and creator of objects Jitka Svobodová is known to many people, and they are even convinced that they know it well – simply put: she is dedicated to drawing, and especially to drawing objects. However, once you enter the world of her works of art, everything simple becomes very complicated: drawing is a broad, multilayered concept, a medium with many expressive possibilities, through which Jitka Svobodová explores the world around her in a very authentic way. Similarly, the objects with which she is most often associated are only one section of her work, representing issues of shape and space; equally important is the depiction of the phenomena and situations that surround and frame physical (and later often ephemeral) objects.
Surprisingly, this is Jitka Svobodová’s first retrospective exhibition. She has prepared a series of partial exhibitions where she introduced and verified individual cycles she was working on at the time, to some extent closing them and continuing with other themes. At the same time, this is a retrospective in one of the most beautiful spaces in Prague, but not an easy one from the point of view of installation – pencil and pastel drawings and delicate objects need both space and a certain intimacy that allows focused viewing.
Continuous browsing through Jitka Svobodová’s work and free discussions with her led me to several starting points that determined the actual form of the exhibition. I realised that despite the various drawing techniques and range of colours she used in different periods, and despite the various themes depicted, her work is uniquely compact. That is to say, that while presenting a classical chronological line of work is one possible way of displaying her work, the aim has rather been to try to present certain bodies of thought and the development of certain themes that better capture the nature of the artist’s work. Given the space of the Library, we are creating several sections which, while in some ways respecting the chronological line, radically disrupt it in many places.
The second important starting point in the preparation of the exhibition was the attempt to bring the viewer to “look” as attentively as possible, i.e. to enable a focused encounter with the artist’s works of art. Jitka Svobodová often creates large-format drawings whose execution is masterly and consummate – they do not contain what is often associated with drawing, i.e., attempts to find a potential final shape and various optional solutions. Jitka Svobodová’s drawings are events, independent actions taking place in space and time, demanding the viewer’s attention. They seem to be based on existing relations and familiar spatial structures, which they often unsettle in an unobtrusive way. It is also an adventure to observe the artist’s own drawing gesture, the way she works with pencil and pastel, how she can express dynamism or solidity through this gesture. This is also true of the drawings in space, the objects she has been creating since the early 1970s. These works, made of wire, insulating tubing and dyed papier-mâché, have a distinctly plastic surface as opposed to two-dimensional drawings, and they draw in and respond to their surroundings. Here again, the role of the viewer is of key importance, consisting in their “enjoying” the multiple perspectives and creating their own connections to the surrounding environment.
Jitka Svobodová has repeated several times that one of the paths she considered was to become a sculptor; the choice to devote herself fully to drawing ultimately offered a much broader field for personal exploration, nevertheless, the sense of space, of largesse, of monumentality and, above all, an ever-present “physicality” still refer to some kind of sculptural principle of creation. And, after all, it was in objects that she returned to “handmade” sculptural work.
In the Municipal Library, we are presenting Jitka Svobodová’s works ranging from the mid-1960s, when she focused mainly on painting, to those created this year. The exhibition is structured into five units in the main halls and the entrance corridor (Space and Connection, Objects, Phenomena and Movement, Energy and Light and Trees) and ten “case studies” in cubicles, which have made it possible to highlight certain aspects, such as why we cannot speak of abstract art in the case of Jitka Svobodová’s works. The period of rigid normalisation, her projects accomplished within the Chmelnice symposium in Mutějovice and some unique works, such as the large Day and Night object, will be referred to. An important partner in installing the exhibition is the architect, Josef Pleskot, who has left the halls without panelling to emphasise the way in which the artist’s works are interconnected; he also instigated an installation evoking Jitka’s studio and work desk. Together with the graphic designer Matěj Bárta, we were all driven by the desire to create a space for the artist’s work that was as open as possible and as concentrated as possible.
The more one delves into Jitka Svobodová’s work, the more one realises the extent to which it is filled with strong energy and emotion. In connection with this, we can discuss philosophical questions about the nature of being, existence, unity and the whole, the relationship of a human being to systems, nature and the universe… and engage with questions of creation as such.
The first retrospective exhibition of the artist Jitka Svobodová was prepared by the GHMP for the clean, large space of the Municipal Library’s halls. Her life’s work can be characterised by a few terms – drawing, object, sensibility, quintessence, concentration and time. Each of these sums up a huge number of other messages and possible interpretations. Petr Vizina had a dialogue with the artist in her studio, both about the present and about looking back on her work.
Q We are sitting in the studio where all your works are created. You still live and work in the street where you grew up and went to school. How important is loyalty to place, stabilitas loci, for you?
J S Both continuity and place have always been important to me, for sure. I was born in Vinohrady and I still live here. I wasn’t the type to emigrate; that requires self-assertiveness and I don’t give a damn about that. My artistic generation is practically non-existent, there are maybe three of us who remained here after 1968 and each of us is completely different. Even the work is related to where and how one lives.
Q What does your daily rhythm look like?
J S I used to work long hours; now I don’t have the energy. Good daylight is important for me, so in winter I only work until early afternoon. When it’s dark and you have to turn on the lights, the nuances disappear, the artificial light changes the colours. It would probably work if I was doing something less delicate, but not for what I do. I draw mostly using pastels. They have diffused light; the painting is tangible and its refraction of light is different. Personally, I believe that it is necessary to make one’s way to drawing. It is possible that there are cases of those who draw right from the beginning throughout their lives, but they are exceptions. Either you arrive at drawing or you apply drawing in a different way. Those who go to the academy want to draw. They should go through their painting stage, too. Sculptors, for example, are usually good at drawing. It is the same with me; I painted for eight years and only then did I arrive at drawing. Drawing has an incredible amount of expression. You can draw like Dürer, why not, there were those who drew like that. Or completely spontaneously; it depends on your frame of mind and type. You can make installations, objects, materials and it’s still drawing. My drawing always changes with the subject, as does the way of working.
Q Which theme are you currently working on?
J S I have just finished a big theme, Tablecloths. To a person who doesn’t read the title, Tablecloths may seem to be an abstract affair. However, there is still some content perceivable in the drawings; it is there. I have a lot of my mother’s tablecloths at home, traditional ones, beautifully decorated, but I try to deny the visual aspect. Today’s world is very visual; the Internet, television and advertising attack us. With each of my themes, I want to continue to be more reductive. The important thing is that the drawing is made by hand. That’s why I’ve never been interested in graphic art because it works with printmaking, but what I need is the touch of the hand. Printmaking will create amazing things, but that’s not what I’m after. I want to get to a certain essence of the thing.
Q How did you manage to achieve this with the tablecloths?
J S I realised that a tablecloth is actually almost always a rectangle or a square. When you unfold it and put it on the table, it’s just that rectangle or square again. Originally, I was just taking the outlines as a basis, but then, with the larger rectangular drawings, 170 by 135 centimetres, it occurred to me that when you fold the tablecloth and then unfold it, there is a kind of grid on the tablecloth. So I drew the grid of the folded tablecloth in the rectangle, but unfortunately, I can’t think of any more variations. That’s the end of the tablecloth theme for me.
Q Does the larger drawing of the three round tables that you have leaning against the wall here belong to the theme of tablecloths?
J S I tried to draw the covered tables, as you can see in the painting on the wall, but it’s too visual a theme for me. It’s more for relaxation. You see, I don’t work towards a big reduction all the time, sometimes I do something more realistic. But then again, I have a huge urge to get something into that minimal position. I’m fascinated, for example, by the fact that a mug or a plate are almost unchanging forms. I mean, designers come up with all sorts of things, but that’s bullshit. A plain mug and plate are the essentials. I was most fascinated by their interior space. Strangely enough, even when things are static, they usually don’t have anything static about them. I tilt them. Because that’s what I feel I should do. The surface I’m drawing on itself is static and passive, which is why, for example, I shift the mug I draw several times a day. Or I tilt it a little bit. But it can’t be too much, just a little. I’m not concerned with perspective at all, I’m interested in subject and space. When you look into a mug, it has an inner space. I would also mention the themes of Pillows, Tables and Curtains in terms of my current work; before that, my big theme was Eyes. The sign of a great theme for me is when I can work on it longer and it keeps opening up. But sometimes I just do a few things and that’s it.
Q What theme did you fail to “open”?
J S Smoke was an amazingly big topic that I haven’t been able to fully revise. I used to take the train to Ústí nad Labem, and we would pass chimneys that smoked amazingly. Not that that was the inspiration, but smoke has a certain dynamic. In a drawing, however, the smoke came out too static. I realised it would be good to film it, for example. In a film, smoke would definitely be more interesting, but I don’t want to venture into other media, even though it’s fashionable nowadays. I’d have to delve into it a lot, not just film the smoke. I can’t do anything straight off.
Q How do you actually choose your themes – tablecloth, pillow or smoke?
J S It’s always good when the stimulus comes from the outside. The impulse means that something speaks to me and I have to approach it somehow. I need to rethink that impulse. Sometimes it works, sometimes less so. Sometimes it surprises me, at other times I am unable to do anything with the subject. But it always comes from a certain impulse from the outside. It’s a chance occurrence that has to come from above. Of course, you can come up with themes, but that doesn’t quite work for me. Of course, then I think about it and keep inventing. Then I think about the task. Either the theme goes away or it doesn’t.
Q You actually came to the seemingly simple themes of your drawings involuntarily, under the existential pressure of normalisation in the early 1970s. Was that so?
J S I studied painting at the Academy and was constantly creating. But my mother, who spoke three languages and worked in foreign trade, was fired at that time for political reasons and my father had a heart attack. I realised that I had to look at the situation realistically and I had to be able to earn a living. It’s not possible to stay with your parents and have the advantage of having a place to live and something to eat. I decided to go on to study painting restoration. It was a good technology lesson, and it helped me in my own work. I can fix a painting or a drawing. I took it purely as a source of income, but you have to enjoy the work at the same time, it is extremely demanding of time and patience. We mostly worked on ceilings that nobody wanted to do, under terrible conditions. It was ten below zero, there were no doors or windows, we were plugging the holes with plastic, it was freezing, but the work had to be done. The water mains were wrapped in sacking, we carried buckets of water that splashed into our boots. I didn’t have time to paint anymore. I thought I was done with art. In that moment of personal crisis, drawing came to me of itself. I told myself I would make little records of my surroundings. I drew the planks I walked on, the scaffolding, the wires, the light bulb, the ladder. Until then, I had been focused on painting, abstract landscapes, for example. Suddenly, I was drawn to the very ordinary things that surrounded me. From that, the enormous simplicity of the world in which I was operating developed. At that moment, I understood that simplicity suited me. There was a kind of socialist realism in vogue at the time and so my path was a solitary one. Jiří Kolář bought me something, but that was about it. Jindřich Chalupecký didn’t reject me but he said that he preferred female artists who worked with their own bodies. Eva Kmentová, for example, imprinted herself in plaster, Adriena Šimotová also thematised femininity, but I was never good at it. I was a freelance artist until I was almost fifty, before I got to work at an art school, thanks to Knížák. He invented a drawing school. Drawing had never existed as a separate discipline, there was only a preparatory course at art school that everyone took in the first two years of study.
Q At the time when you were only drawing after work, who were you able to talk to about your work?
J S If anyone’s opinions on my work were really important, they was probably Adriena Šimotová’s. I assisted her for a few years, and it was very important for me because at that time, I was studying restoration and I was using art to relax. Adriena was surrounded by famous artists, so I was able to get a glimpse of them. Otherwise, I don’t discuss anything with anyone concerning my work. You see, I’ve found that when someone gives me advice, it doesn’t really affect me. Another question is, why doesn’t it? Sure, it’s good to have someone give you their opinion on what you’re doing, but I don’t think you should always accommodate it.
Q In your studio, you have wire objects – both small and large. Are they related to the drawings?
J S The wire objects are mostly responses to my drawings. When I was drawing vessels, cups and plates, the wire was good for creating their outlines. You can make it all big, too, but then you need someone to weld it for you. Or, for example, I used to do the Fires on my own. I thought drawing fires was silly, I tried it, but it’s kind of bland. But in wire, it had tremendous dynamics. When you go around it, it changes and you really get a sense of fire. I’ve always been attracted to wire as a material. It reminds me of drawing, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that you bend the wire and it’s there, whereas drawing it… Plus, wires have coloured insulation nowadays. Mostly, I just work with used materials. They have a certain patina, plus the used wires aren’t exactly straight. They have their own sensitivity. I’m making spiders now. They’re neither drawn nor made out of wire, but from bonded wool. Most of my works are static, the spiders move. There are plenty of spiders. I don’t know what happened; I have spiders in my bathroom and in my kitchen. There’s also a big increase in the number of spiders in Senohraby, where I go to. I enjoy making spiders but I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do with them.
Q Trees are a constant theme for you. Do you consider them as static or do they move?
J S Trees are not static; a tree moves. A tree is like a person, each one is completely different, each one grows differently, askew, in all sorts of ways. Unless someone destroys it, it’s like a human being, it lives a long time. When a tree sheds its leaves, it’s completely different, like a human skeleton. It’s strange. Actually, I don’t know why I make trees. They’re really an ongoing theme for me. I’d like to start my exhibition with trees because, strangely enough, I come back to trees regularly.
Q Which quality is most important to you, patience?
J S Patience? I guess so. I don’t care if something doesn’t work out, I just keep trying.
“The individual rooms themselves decided what to put in them.” This is how Margita Titlová describes the work on her non-chronological retrospective at the Stone Bell House. Which of the exhibited works were not originally intended for the public eye? Where did the lipstick drawings and wedding dresses in her work come from? How are magnetic force and decomposition of the light spectrum related in her work? Inscribing her own shadow and touch onto the world, intuition continuing in technologies: Margita Titlová recaps the fundamental techniques and turning points of her career for Qartal.
Shadow
While still at the academy, at the time when I was seeing these amazing friends, I decided to embark on a personal cleansing. I told myself that I would start developing myself to find my own style. It was clear to me that I had to work with what I knew, with what I had. Well, what was it? My own body and my shadow. Because my body is reflected in the surrounding reality: when it casts a shadow, it is a fundamental imprint on the world. Even if I have nothing else, that’s something to work with. I quietly started to work with this; at the academy they taught rather technical aspects of painting, a completely different world. The photographs I took in different situations and personal events were not originally intended to be exhibited at all: I meant them to be part of my research. And not only photos: I started to draw on my shadow. I projected my shadow on paper, studied it, was drawing onto it. I was studying my reality through artistic means. Where the shadow is multiplied, there I moved. And I photographed it with a self-timer: although my work sometimes had the nature of action, there was no audience to follow it, I did everything in solitude.
Touch
The photos then began to be accompanied by separate touch drawings. In them, I am already modifying the relationship between a human and reality by an artistic process, by abstraction: the red pigment, that is lipstick. Eventually, I didn’t need the shadow anymore. I came to the point that I could do without it; it was no longer necessary for me to see the reality of my reflection in front of me. The actions in which I intervened in the environment, changed the space with my presence, that’s the continuation of working with the shadow for me. To draw pictures on a wall, to dig up the earth: then you leave, as one goes into death, and what remains is a space marked by your previous presence. Did I have anyone to talk to in the early days? Well, all the time. Look, I’m still in the community, the community of artists. I’ve never been a loner.
Trade Fair Palace 1984
When I started to work more expressively, the works asked for large dimensions. It’s important for me to stand against the monumental format as against a storm. Or like when you look at nature in the rain. The painting has to be so big that I can physically enter it: In my performances I studied how the body works in reality, and with monumental paintings I directly continued this. The dimension was mostly the wall of my studio in Petrská Street. A wall or a floor. It couldn’t get any bigger. It was in this situation that I managed to arrange an exhibition for myself at the Trade Fair Palace: unofficial, of course, the palace was all destroyed after the fire, it was a construction site closed to the public. In 1984, nobody had any idea that it would house the National Gallery one day. I needed walls large enough for my big paintings. The site manager, who was on good terms with the cultural underground, made it all possible. He even built some walls especially for my works. They were exhibited there for three days and were seen by many people, some came from as far as Slovakia. That’s what my solo exhibition looked like under the conditions prevailing at that time. I was 26.
Lipsticks
Painting with lipstick: It’s not directly feminist of me, I’m not that kind of a person – but it stems from female experience. When you have experience with make-up, using lipstick, you’ll find out that the pigment in a lipstick is a flawless, high-quality material with which touch drawings can be perfectly made. You can add and subtract red, which implies physicality, the will to live and be beautiful! The length of some of the drawings is four and a half metres: we had to reserve space for them in the large hall at the Stone Bell House.
Kirlian
My brother is a psychotherapist. It was he who told me about the existence of the so-called Kirlian device. The first version was invented by Nikola Tesla and perfected in the 1930s by someone called Semyon Kirlian. It records human touch on photographic paper which is illuminated by small electrical discharges at the point of contact. Apparently, something about the physical and mental state can be read from it and there is speculation as to whether this device can display the glow of the aura. However, I was fascinated by it for another reason. After all the touch drawings, I no longer had to express myself in colour but directly with the imprint of my body! My brother had this machine built for me – isn’t he great? And I started to paint in the darkroom, using myself, the truth – instead of paint – depicting what I was at that very moment. I could leave out all the lipstick and other tools, I touched the paper with this hand and left a mark on it. You can’t fully control the result when you work in the dark, of course.
Bardots
It might seem that the Bardots series is about something completely different, but it’s related. I became interested in why women wear make-up and dress fashionably and what the aesthetics of female beauty is in today’s society. I discovered that it stems from the 1960s, from actresses and films of the time. Their stories said: if you look like the stars in the lead roles, what happened to them will happen to you. You’ll also experience heartwarming stories with a romantic handsome man riding a horse. Movies have really motivated women for years. It’s not just the clean looks, the fashion elements: it’s the story as well. I studied it for some time and created a series of diptychs: one part is a large photograph, for example Brigitte Bardot, and next to it is my abstract portrait of the same person created in the dark. I felt that a good contrast also lies in the fact that I portray a certain feminine artificiality, facade, I do portraits just with my body, with my physical existence: which is exactly what Kirlian’s device allows.
Invisible
I’m always interested in visualizing something hidden that we can’t see. When I find a technology that can reveal it, I immediately go in for it and use it. Magnetic force: you can see its effect but the energy itself of the magnet is invisible. That’s why I used to put magnets in my sculptures. That’s why I installed upright knives that don’t touch anything at the tips: they float upwards, trembling slightly in the air – and you can’t see the force that holds them. I guide the light that surrounds us through glass prisms or reflect it with CDs, compact discs: the white light is transformed and suddenly you can paint with it, project a colour spectrum somewhere. In this case, it is also about capturing a moment, stopping time in constant change. The photographer is standing next to me, we are catching fleeting moments, the light sometimes comes out nicely but it also disappears immediately. I shout at Kiva, the photographer Vladimír Novotný: “Come on! Go ahead! Now!” And then I move and everything changes and Kiva says: “It’s gone.” What attracts me about it? Everything! It’s beautiful to see things that I’ve only felt before. Not that it’s a direct answer to my questions about what life means. It’s more of a shiver than an answer. But through art, I can look at them.
In the Field
When you need to calm down, you close your eyes and figure out how you feel. I used to turn off the light at night, take some red paint and start doing automatic drawing. Someone else might start singing a tune they were making up at the time, I would calm myself down by drawing. Without giving myself an assignment or a question. And suddenly, there was always a sentence to go with the automaticity. Out of the jumble of thoughts, the mess of chemistry inside my head, something would emerge. One of those sentences was: Plant yourself in a field. I liked it so much! It meant renewal to me: plant yourself in the field, you have a chance to grow again! The next sentences I wrote down were: “The deserts are ending” or “Thank you, that’s what I want”. But I knew I couldn’t put those words in the drawings. Finally, I carved them into plexiglass and let them cast shadows on the drawings. This is where my other large-scale drawings stem from. The Plant Yourself in the Field series is painted entirely using earth. I am actually painting the field I am supposed to plant myself in. The Earth is a higher principle. Earth is a material that constantly reminds you: you live in something higher. I understand that the spectrum of colours is not present here but, as a material, earth is extremely important to me. I wrote love letters using earth even on the brides’ white wedding dresses: texts by Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, and lyrics of Moravian folk songs.
Thermography
In recent years, I have been working a lot with thermal imaging. It shows you the thermal reality, for example around the human body. So in “thermal imaging paintings” I follow the traces of myself: my head, my breath, my hands placed on the thermal film, but also the heated place where my hands were resting a moment ago and are no longer there. Sometimes I work with a heat torch, with warm wax. I used to use ice to draw a large butterfly on the wall: the drawing is cool blue in thermography, me myself, on the other hand, standing in front of it, I am hot red, on the other side of the spectrum… It is about the same fascination of mine, taking place here: the revelation of the invisible. The shadow, the light, the imprint of myself on the environment, the movement across the boundary from the material world to the revealed imagination: in fact, it has been going round and round and returning regularly in my work for years. At the Stone Bell House, these years find themselves collected in one place, or at least some of the directions my work has been moving in over the past forty years.
Margita Titlová: Vertical Purple
15 February – 14 May 2023, Stone Bell House Curator: Magdalena Juříková
Architect of the exhibition: Miroslav Jiřele
