A L E N A K U Č E R O V Á / P O I N T , I M A G E , L A N D S C A P E . . .
EXHIBITION DATE: 09.06.- 31.08.24
EXHIBITION OPENING: SATURDAY / 08/06/2024 FROM 3:00 PM
EXHIBITION CONCEPT: JANA HLADÍKOVÁ, JAROSLAV PECKA
TEXT: JAROMÍR ZEMINA
DERNISAGE OF THE EXHIBITION: 31. 08. 2024 / 17:00
THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION WILL TAKE PLACE WITHIN THE 66TH YEAR OF THE SMETAN LITOMYŠL FESTIVAL
Drawing is the starting point for everything that Alena Kučerová (*1935) has created as an artist over the course of more than sixty years. The need for order and precision led Alena to express herself already in the late 1950s using geometric forms, which she used to depict both abstract (Beautiful Tuesday, Celebration) and concrete ideas (Skaliska, In the sea), but this geometry does not appear cold, the lines and curves are not perfectly straight and as they would tremble. She soon replaced pen drawing with a graphic technique known as dry needle, and in the first half of the 1960s she added to the engraved lines points created by punching sheet metal, inspired by the work of her grandfather, a cobbler, piercing leather soles and hammering flocks into them. Over time, she completely replaced linear graphics with these perforations and not only printed the perforated sheet metal, but also exhibited them as unique artefacts, sometimes supplemented with colors, the compositions of which she varied in various ways. Elsewhere, however, she considered the colors redundant and emphasized the lightness of the clean base surface. She used such lightened perforations especially for figural water scenes.
At the end of the 1960s, Alena began depicting landscapes in addition to abstract and figurative compositions. She reached her peak in this direction in the eighties in Staroboleslavsk, the region of her ancestors. These large-scale graphic images of simple, seemingly uninteresting subjects, such as a bridge over a stream in a vast plain, created with a minimum of means of expression, almost from nothing, became a celebration of the earth, free space, light and silence. They were followed by images of thickets, mainly forests, welcoming and yet mysterious, as the opposite of spaciousness, with which she ended her graphic work after leaving the printing press. However, she did not give up the perforation technique and turned the perforated sheets into objects of a new kind, when she began to insert them into frames composed of unusual objects, such as twigs found in nature and discarded boards.
In her late work, Alena expressed her love for nature and her new desire for colors with two types of paintings, the subject of which are flowers. He creates them on the one hand by flat, unusually dense painting on sheet metal, on the other hand by assembling pieces of brightly colored textiles or embroidering.
The concentration and independence of her creative work ranks Alena Kučerová among the personalities of the contemporary art world.
We thank the author's family, the Dolmen Gallery, the Pecka Gallery, the Závodný Mikulov Gallery and private collectors for lending the exhibited works. Special thanks to Jaromír Zemin for the text materials and Jaroslav Brabac for providing the photos.
The exhibition was created in cooperation with Galeria Pecka.
