Alena Nadvonikova
Zoomorphic composition, 1979, India ink on paper
1979

About the Item

Alena NADVORNIKOVA (née en 1942) Zoomorphic composition, 1979 India ink on paper Signed and dated "1979" lower left 50 x 32 cm Frame : 60 x 40 cm A Czech artist born in 1942 in Lipnik nad Becvou (Moravia), Alena Nadvornikova is a painter, poet, theorist and art historian. Since the 1970s, she has been an active member of the Surrealist movement, which grew out of the Prague Surrealist Group founded in 1934 and bringing together leading figures from the literary and artistic worlds. Its members adhered to André Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), while developing their own specificities. The Prague Surrealist Group has endured over the generations and still exists today. It is structured mainly around its journal Analogon and has given rise to a variety of aesthetics, as demonstrated by the work of Alena Nadvornikova. The group's founding artists contributed to European surrealism between the wars, notably through the work of Vratislav Effenberger (1923-1986), successor to Karel Teige (1900-1951), doyen of Czech surrealism. This movement was a direct descendant of poetism, a Czech literary and artistic movement inspired by Dadaism, founded in 1923, and to which the young Alena Nadvornikova devoted an in-depth study. As a student at the University of Olomouc, she took classes with the theoretician and photographer Vaclav Zykmund (1914-1984), whom she also assisted in his research. This meeting was one of the key events in her artistic career. A singular spirit, she developed an original artistic genre that she called "kresbobásně": poem-drawings. In this way, she combines poetry and drawing, which she sees as two complementary disciplines. It's a spontaneous mechanism that consists of creating without premeditation. She began composing them when she returned from her first stay in Paris at the age of seventeen, after which she remained fascinated by the French artists Henri Michaux, Philippe Soupault, André Breton and André Masson. Her work includes eight collections of poetry and around twenty exhibitions of graphic art. The artist's spontaneous drawings are critical of any form of intellectual interpretation of his work, allowing for an infinite number of compositions. Although some of them may seem disturbing, they all have a powerful quality that makes them instantly memorable. Alena Nadvornikova's drawings sometimes go against the grain of what might appear pleasant from the outside, and require special attention to read. In her Prague flat, the artist created a work of total art, using this living space as the basis for an immense intuitive composition made up of lines linking together all the elements - doors, heating pipes, furniture and paintings. Works related to the three presented here are held in the collections of Czech and Slovak institutions.

Creator:

Alena Nadvonikova (1942, Czech)

Creation Year:

1979

Dimensions:

Height: 19.69 in (50 cm)Width: 12.6 in (32 cm)

More Editions & Sizes:

Original workPrice: $927

Medium:

India Ink

Period:

1970-1979