Ivana Šrámková “Feathered”

Heller Gallery

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Heller Gallery presents Ivana Šrámková | Feathered – a suite of new pieces by the Czech sculptor, whose work we have represented since the mid-1990s.
The exhibition consists of a dozen new small-scale sculptures of birds. The series started in 2009 when Ivana was given a box of inspiring, but no longer wanted odds and ends collected over a lifetime by her mother-in-law, the award winning Czech architect, Alena Šrámková. The various bits and pieces of broken sculptures, stones, shells and twigs re-emerged as a small-scale flock, which easily carries the larger ideas that are the prerogative of the artist’s work.

The new pieces still incorporate found objects, but their choices are more intentional. In an era dominated and manipulated by social media, Šrámková’s work adheres to art historian Norman Bryson’s definition of “rhopography - a depiction of things that lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks.” First modeled in wax, the haptic surfaces of the cast glass birds are kin to the artist’s large-scale work for architecture in materials such as bronze and concrete. Šrámková mines the vast array of human expressions and with a light hand — one of the most enduring qualities of her work — manages to fill their small bodies with a monumental sculpture’s worth of character.

Ivana Šrámková, received her MFA from the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design in Prague where she was a member of Professor Stanislav Libenský’s prominent last class, from which some of the leading figures of the first post-communist generation of Czech artists emerged. Šrámková’s work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan. In 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.