Jiří Žlebek – sculptures • Kateřina Žlebková – drawings

The sculptor Jiří Žlebek has invited the draughtswoman and painter Kateřina Žlebková to be the guest exhibitor at his jubilee exhibition. Whereas their life partnership rules out the category of guest, in the world of fine art, she maintains that position. This meeting of two partners, two creative approaches, forms a pleasant tension at the exhibition, founded on an admirable harmonic understanding of the world and human values, expressed however in quite different formal expressions. Here is a refreshing polarity arising from the originality of their talents and their mutual loving acceptance and support of the individuality of the other.

Jiří Žlebek has been an important personality on the Czech fine arts scene for several decades now. Jiří Žlebek is also a warm friend, a diligent man with infectious life energy. His deposit of tenacity and idealism, thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, attention to life and relationship to human values is one carried in his genes and in the experiences of his family, many of which he has made good use of in his work. He studied at the Palacký University Olomouc Faculty of Arts, in the happy time of the nineteen-sixties, when the Department of Art Education was thriving – thanks to such teachers as Václav Zykmund, Miroslav Štolfa, and Vladimír Navrátil. A very strong generation of artists matured there, which for example after 1989 founded the Society of Olomouc Visual Artists and the tradition of Galerie Caesar. At this jubilee exhibition the artist is showing a selection of sixteen objects, one-third of which are earlier works, and two-thirds created during the years 2014–2016.

Regarding the genesis of Žlebek’s work, his orientation on sculptural work (also thanks to his friendship with the sculptor Ivan Theimer) began at the end of the nineteen-sixties. I remember his beginnings well: such as the exhibition at the Olomouc University Club on Švedská Street in 1967, where he showed his first sculptural works together with graphic works by Ondřej Michálek. His personal style crystalised in the nineteen-seventies. These were perfectly executed wooden and polychrome figural sculptures (with handles for carrying) of dubious heroes, sculptures with simple mechanisms making it possible to express the emptiness of stiff gestures made by the manipulators of power, and expressing the manipulability of others. Allegories of the time, the life of deadening rituals – we understood all that perfectly and looked forward to his next works. Žlebek’s sculptures reacted to that period of distress and their easily decipherable meanings had a liberating effect upon us. The artist has always had a sense of hyperbole, an understanding of the ambiguity of situations, and his sculptures with mobile elements contained a critical, yet amiable “Žlebek sense of humour”, which is connected with his temperamental need for play. This tone lives on in his contemporary sculptures. Works from the period 2014–2016, created in the Žlebeks’ atelier in Olbramice in the Drahan highlands, carry similar messages. In their form and content, they are an organic continuation of his previous work, and the majority of them are exhibited here for the first time. I am thinking for example of the sculptures Donator, Elevation, Lullaby, Cars Greeting Each Other, and Cabin. Jiří Žlebek says that for him the titles of the sculptures are important, as the word is always the first impulse in creation. For example, in these sculptures, the symbols of the over-technicised age come to life, in which however the artist manages to find not only principles of play, but also historical themes in which he is able to evoke the need for serious gestures and hold the mirror up to empty gestures.

Žlebek’s work, like the stylistic charge of the mythical Czech figure of Jára Cimrman[i] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jára_Cimrman), has already been categorised by art theoreticians as “Czech Grotesque” (slapstick) and in the history of Czech fine arts, it is a phenomenon which undoubtedly transcends the period of its inception. To date the biggest critical evaluation of his artistic profile took place four years ago at the Olomouc Museum of Art at the triple-show of Šembera – Michálek – Žlebek, accompanied by individual catalogues of those exhibiting.

And one more point. Jiří Žlebek loves his city of birth. In 1976, he made a wooden model of the historic centre of Olomouc. During the period of Normalisation however, it was not possible to arrange its showing. Between 2010–2012, he made a model of the Olomouc fortifications from 1758. He conceived it as a sculpture of the city, in no way as a mere technical, realistic artefact. This monumental piece – 7.5 × 6.5 metres – has attracted deserved admiration and today is the king-pin of the Museum of the Olomouc Fortifications. It ranks alongside the Langweil model of Prague from 1826–1837 in its importance; however it occupies an area more than twice as large. At present it is made of plaster and awaits bronze casting. Even though it is housed several hundred metres away from Galerie Caesar, we can consider this work part of the artist’s jubilee exhibition.

Kateřina Žlebková settled into the local Haná area nearly seventeen years ago; since the year 2006 she has been a member of the Society of Olomouc Visual Artists, and it seems that she earned her esteemed position among Olomouc artists due to her talent, and, I would add, devotion to art. The clarity of her drawing was already admired during her art studies at the university in Ostrava during the mid-1970s. Kateřina remembers with gratitude the noblesse of Karel Svoboda, who taught her drawing, graphic art and composition. She also studied under Zdeněk Kučera and Jaroslav Rusek. Afterwards she dedicated herself to editorial and teaching activities. Her dream, the possibility to immerse herself in creative work, into painting and drawing, was finally realised by being by the side of her husband, the sculptor Jiří Žlebek. Her works for several years now have been shown as part of the annual exhibition of the OSVA members, and always elicit surprise by their qualitative leap from year to year.

Speaking of her drawings, they have their own autonomous position in her work – enriching, according to Ladislav Daněk, the now codified concept of “Olomouc drawing”. Since crossing the starting line, in just a few years Kateřina has soared into a highly visible and recognised artist: her drawings have been selected by juries for the exhibition of finalists in the prestigious International Biennial of Drawing Pilsen three times in a row: 2010, 2012, and 2014. Her sepia ink drawing The Word travelled to exhibitions in Hungary and Germany in 2015. She also had success in the International Drawing Competition Wroclav in 2012. Proof of the development of her draughting creativity are the designs for three prizes for Trilobit Beroun and finally the cycle of watercolours Two Old Women, presented at an exhibition in the Olomouc Museum of Art coffeehouse Café 87 at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017.

At the Galerie Caesar exhibition, Kateřina is exhibiting sixteen large-format ink drawings with diverse themes, made between 2010–2016. They are admirable for their interplay of detail and composition, often with a light touch of humour. Small figures, both historical and contemporary personalities, are depicted and precisely characterised with just a few delicate brushstrokes, placed by her in meaningful detail into a composition – for example in the shape of a tsunami wave (The Wave), a closed circle of readers (The Evening), or the cosmic forms of the Biblical world creation (The Word I, The Word II and The Word III) – subtly legible. The characterising exactitude of figural detail and its arrangement into meaningful structures which in a way spontaneously and organically give birth into artistic metaphor outside of the rationality of purpose, create an internal tension between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos of human being. And all in a seriousness, a veracity, with an internal ethos and quivering frailty of the message, which is offered up to the viewer to decipher.

Anežka Šimková, November 2016