NYAB Event - Ivana Šrámková "Creatures"

Ivana Šrámková "Creatures"

Heller Gallery

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Heller Gallery presents Creatures, a solo exhibition of new work by Czech artist Ivana Šrámková.

The sculptures of Ivana Šrámková are three-dimensional distillations of basic figurative forms, both animal and human, with a healthy dose of character. Reduced to their essence each is described in a language of simple geometric symbols. What makes them extraordinary is Šrámková’s ability to give them just enough of the archetypal to make them identifiable, just enough gesture to endow them with wit, and just enough reference to make them universal. As such they stand comfortably in the timeless continuum of art and artifact. Šrámková says she has been inspired by the sparseness and simplicity of folk art and the direct quality of African art. “In the age of abstract glass sculpture it seemed that my realism was entirely new and revolutionary.” Her larger-than-life figures, such as the icy pink Introvert, featured in the exhibition, have developed as technology has advanced. “Now a mass of up to 800 lbs. of very transparent glass can be melted into one piece. It allows the viewer to simultaneously consider the hand hewn surface and the inside.” No other material or technique yields the same intensity of colored light and, at the same time, monumental ephemerality. The artist adds: “only recently have I emphasized glass in this way and used its dreaded beauty.”

Ivana Šrámková, received her MFA from the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design in Prague where she was a member of Professor Stanislav Libensky’s prominent last class, from which some of the leading figures of the first post-communist generation of Czech artists have emerged. Šrámková’s work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan. Most recently in September of 2011, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition entitled I Can’t Stop at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic. Her sculptures are represented in the collections of the National Gallery and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England; the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, USA and the Museum of Modern Art in Lausanne, Switzerland.