Sedláková Vladimíra *1952

Degree of roughness - 4 pcs, 1993

Ink, pencil, canvas, author's moulding, 130 × 130 cm, all pieces numbered and signed on the reverse by Vladimíra Sedláková
Among the fresh graduates of the Academy in Prague who returned to Brno in the early 1980s, Vladimíra Sedláková's exceptional sensitivity to the signs of industrial civilization and to the infrastructure of technology (technical drawings, graphs) caught the attention of the early years of her journey. The author enhanced the individual formal elements - scribbled and hatched surfaces, spatiality, movement, the use of numbers and letters - in her "fictitiously real" series. From the reality of the concept, the plan, she integrated them into a new alternative structure of open content - a chain of variations. The shapes-signs lose their original meaning and function, creating a dynamic plan of ideal aesthetic value. In the latest series, Vladimíra Sedláková has devoted herself to the maximum freedom from shape, a reduction that acquires the necessary depth and dimension thanks to serial combinatorics. The result surprises with a strange hedonistic liking for shapes and colours in space and a poeticism that seems to arise unconsciously. Rhythmization and repetition create "figures", patterns that dialogue between the open and the closed, the static and the mobile, substance and decoration, colour and non-colour. Here we hear echoes of efforts to combine construction and poetry, efforts dear to the Czech avant-garde. We also recognise the more recent efforts to "see and think at the same time" and the minimalist manoeuvre to make form transparent and immaterial. There is a great space for new outbursts. From the introductory text by Jana Šálková to the catalogue for Vladimíra Sedláková's solo exhibition at the Špála Gallery in Prague, April 1994. Sedláková not only in terms of the expressiveness and intensity of her work, but also in terms of her (rare in the young generation) orientation towards geometric art. Her starting point was distinctive and gradually showed itself to be load-bearing - a world of technical drawings and graphs, a formalized language referring to the reality of the factory environment and yet able to function on its own... The artist first quoted specific identifiable "information" and at the same time isolated it as a compositional quality of its own, later selecting and layering details in a similar way as they emerge in human memory. The subtlety of the ink and pencil line on the black or white surface of paper or canvas confirmed that the aesthetic quality of the result remained important to Sedláková, that she understood the artwork as an aesthetic actualization of that language that usually serves for utilitarian communication in the environment where it is researched, designed and realized. The consistent work with geometric elements with an obvious emphasis on purely artistic relationships in the picture surface allowed the artist's work to be classified in the sphere of constructive art; the elements she derived from technical spheres even brought her works visually closer to the intuitively working classical constructivists, known from the interwar avant-gardes; the clear relationship to the world of technology and especially its two-dimensional representation guaranteed the artist's unmistakability and originality. Jiří Valoch, 1990 Provenance: obtained from the artist's studio.