Ira Svobodová

Ira Svobodová (1986) has gained recognition among both gallerists and collectors for her distinctive approach to painting, as well as to the actual realisation of a work of art. Her artistic expression is based on conceptual sophistication, maximum concentration, precision and reduced, but very delicate and sensitive colours. At the beginning of her career, she focused primarily on the exploration of modernist architecture and dealt with its specific morphology. Her initiating moment was an internship in Rio de Janeiro, where she was particularly interested in Oscar Niemeyer’s work. Some of her architectural thinking was then reflected in her painting practice. She works in series and before each of them she prepares models from plywood, paper, or in this particular series from ribbons, then she photographs the resulting still lifes and works with them as sketches for paintings. The presented works come from the current VOID series, which the artist first presented at the exhibition Gaspard de la Nuit (GaP, Znojmo, 2 Nov – 8 Dec 2021), the title of which was originally inspired by a composition by Maurice Ravel created on the basis of a compilation of poems by the French poet of Italian origin Aloysius Bertrand. It is his poem that the artist draws on, specifically the poem Chèvremorte, which is the cornerstone of the entire series. Aloysius Bertrand’s book was already an inspiration for avant-garde painters; for example, it was the basis for a symbolist series of paintings from the turn of the 1950s and 1960s by Toyen, an important figure in surrealist painting, which also appealed to Svobodová very much. She borrowed the ribbon symbol from it and transformed it into the basic motif of her own series. In the series, Svobodová elaborates on emptiness from several points of view: as a constitutive element – nothing from which something arises; as a phenomenon shrouded in symbolism and mysticism, accompanying man throughout his life in the form of mental vanitas, reminiscent of human mortality, and as a physical phenomenon – a vacuum. Svobodová is one of the most prominent personalities in the world of contemporary art and has had a number of solo and group exhibitions around the world. Her work is represented in private collections in the Czech Republic, USA, Norway, Canada, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Poland.