Ellen Jilemnická - Sculptress, Prague: Abeceda

About

Ellen Jilemnická

Sculptress

Prague, 2012. Outstanding representative

of the current middle generation of Czech

sculptors. She was born in Hradec Králové

in 1946 and spent her childhood

and adolescence at Hořice in the foothills

of the Giant Mountains, where a specialised

school of stoneworking has existed since

the end of the 19th century, offering tuition

in the technical and artistic aspects

of the local sculptural tradition that dates

back to the Baroque period. After graduating

from there, she studied for a year

at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw

and then at its counterpart in Prague,

where she absorbed the lively creative

atmosphere of the late sixties and became

acquainted with many figures

from the unofficial cultural scene.

In the 1970s and 1980s her own oeuvre,

with its immediacy and its interest

in the comic aspect of figurative and material

situations, was a reaction to the pop-art

and humour that were systematically

fostered within the unofficial cultural scene.

Jilemnická’s sculptural training prepared

her not only for work with coloured

ceramics, her favourite genre, but also

with stone, and this gave rise to her ability

to work on largescale, for which she had

greater scope after the change of regime

in Czechoslovakia. She was not only

actively involved in the revival

of the sculptural symposia at Hořice in 1989,

but she also worked in Austria

at the Oberlaa Park in Vienna

and at Rankweil in 1991.

Further major achievements of that kind

were four statues representing the four

seasons at the Chodov Tower in Prague

in 1998, the larger than life statue

of St John of Nepomuk near the bridge

at Dolní Počernice in Prague in 2004,

and the sandstone statue of the Crown

of Thorns of 2006, which became part

of the joint Stations of the Cross project

undertaken near Kuks in east Bohemia,

which was once a centre of the Czech

sculptural tradition.

Jilemnická also creates unconventional

portraits, often intended for use as public

monuments, such as a portrait

of Comenius for Hořice, portraits

of the brothers Čapek (created as

an entry to a competition for a monument

to them in Prague), and the portrait head

of the mime Ladislav Fialka.

The mainstay of Jilemnická’s oeuvre

is free sculpture. Over the past decades

she has developed the expressive theme

of The Hand and also created

a compellingly dreamlike symbolic object

in her series of sculptures of women’s

heads on the theme of The Gateway.

The sculptures of Ellen Jilemnická

are persuasive evidence that it is still

possible to develop the figural fragment

and thereby touch upon the fundamental

problems connected with the major

cultural question of the regeneration

of figurative sculpture per se.

Contact: ellenjil@seznam.cz