Little Angel II
Little Angel II, 2002
polyester, steel
height 149 cm
Angel II – the part of the original trilogy of angel statues. A work that was partly inspired by various angel sculptures, while writing my thesis on the subject (inspiration from the 19th century – Bouguereau, sculptural realism, Gormley, Wenders, my grandmother’s holy pictures, and even Nabokov’s Lolita). Again, I wanted to leave the viewer in their hidden, unspoken associations and perhaps even in their perversion.
Photos: Ivan Pinkava and Klára Řezníčková
Little Angel I
Little Angel I, 2001
polyester
57 x 22 x 25 cm
Angel I – I modeled him partly from memory, partly from my friend’s two-year-old daughter. In the process, I simplified my ideas about his final form. He was to be nothing more than a sleeping child on the floor, curled up in a “ball” like a little bug. The viewer’s association after the utterance of even a joking idea can have all sorts of consequences. Like a pushed away “thing”, a lying child gives one the impression of being hurt, something that is extra and unwanted. At the same time, metaphorically, the child-angel is my idea of immaculate innocence, which, however, through various influences can become the opposite or the real devil. The ambiguity here is a what-if problem that has long interested me. Another variant of the statue is the statue “Morning Star” from 2011 (see The statue “Morning Star”).
Mr. Václav Stratil
Mr. Václav Stratil, 2000
polyester, acrylic
height 170 cm
Portrait of Mr. Václav Stratil – a modeled portrait of the FaVU pedagogue in clay BUT in Brno and the artist Václav Stratil, subsequently cast from polyester and laminate. Originally just a challenge from one of my classmates, it turned into something performance and action. I gradually spent almost a year studying the body of Václav Stratil. In retrospect, it could be said that it was about a kind of documentation of his physiognomy (Václav changed his weight several times), but also a very unique work, the goal of which was a portrait a distinctive artist in the attitude of his creative process. But that was only part of it the whole work, which also had other overlaps with impacts on my other work in next years. To this day, the conversations that we had when we worked together with Václav are unforgettable for me, and they became very important to me, inspiring and, in a way, he became another mentor to me. During work, I also started to deal with the variability of the surfaces of the sculpture and its colors. To a certain extent, the artist Milan Kozelka also intervened here at some point, who filmed this event on video and helped me create visualizations of surfaces of the emerging sculpture (these materials were exhibited only as a part earlier student theses and unfortunately have not been recovered). The portrait of Václav Stratil became the content of my bachelor’s thesis and the defense took place as a unique performance, with the final question of the portrayed Václav Stratil in the role of the opponent: “Does it still make sense to do statues like this?”
THE FINAL FORM OF THE STATUE
DESIGNS OF SURFACES AND COLOR SOLUTIONS
Designs of the surfaces and color solution of the statue of Václav Stratil, graphic editing on Macintosh Quadra, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator 5.0, collaboration with former students of the graphic design studio FaVU BUT in Brno, fragments of graphic images, 1999-2000.
The designs were created under the influence of period enthusiasm and even euphoria from the new possibilities of computer graphics. At the end of the nineties, the Internet in the Czech Republic was just at the beginning of its expansion, and graphic programs were becoming a powerful tool not only for designers. It was during my work on the portrait of Václav Stratil that I managed to test the possibilities of new graphic technologies and visualizations thanks to my classmates from the graphic design studio FaVU VUT in Brno. From today’s point of view, this is already a banal and long-overdue matter, but at the time the possibilities of these programs seemed like a revelation, they were just becoming technological classics.
Petra
Petra, 1999
gypsum
height 35 cm
From my friend’s reaction: this portrait would be on the bow of a ship… and that ship would be a warship.






















