Olga Karlíková

Olga Karlíková (1923 - 2004)

This exhibition at the Gallery of the School of Applied Arts in Prague presents the work of Olga Karlíková, a graduate of The School of Applied Arts in Prague, where she studied between 1945 and 1948 in the studio of textile art with prof. Antonín Kybal. Before fully embracing fine art, she contributed to and influenced the design of decorative fabrics in Czechoslovakia. Traces of her concentrated work with tapestry and abstract textile designs can also be found in her patient way of making this series of drawings, consisting of transcriptions of the aural environment into graphical scores.

O.K. ševelení - murmering, 2003, pencil on paperpencil on paper

Hundreds of drawings inspired by songs of birds, or voices of frogs create an important part of Karlíková's ouvre, although only a small part of them has so far been exhibited. She began creating these drawings in the mid-sixties, and continued almost until her death in 2004. Karlíková shares with many artists of the 1960s generation of Czechoslovakia and abroad, a strong interest in the musical aspects of contemporary visual art, the acoustics of living space, the aural elements of world, and the duration of time in landscapes. The important difference is that her concern for acoustic perception and the attempt to find a way to translate it into graphical signs was for her not a formal or ideological concept, or even an artistic experiment. In her graphical scores she establishes a personal, poetic, and at the same time precise tool and method to maintain a close relation with the morphology of the landscape, as well as the multitude of living beings with whom she shared space.

A large part of the artwork in this exhibition was created in a specific area near the town of Dubá in northern Bohemia. Here Karlíková bought a small house with a garden and barn, where she kept her modest painting studio. A veranda in the garden and the surrounding countryside served as an open air studio and an artistic challenge for her inexhaustibly rich and variable aural explorations.

Karlíková devoted her undivided attention and time to listening to the voices of birds and frogs, but she was also interested in other ambient sounds, and contemporary music, which she occasionally transcribed into drawings. She examined the voices and behavior of animals and sometimes consulted in her observations with ornithologists and musicians. For her own field recordings she used a simple tape recorder and microphone, and later in the studio she listened to the recorded sounds so as to transcribe them by means of the touch of a pencil, charcoal or brush on sheets of paper. But mostly she worked directly in the landscape - either in her garden, or in the nearby forest valley stream, or in the meadows of the valley. In “real time” - often from dawn to dusk - she represented the songs of individual birds or the dawn chorus in seismographic lines.

O.K.Bird voices, 2004, pencil on paper

To exhibit such a collection of drawings, while at the same time not reducing the richness and subtlety of the details, was a difficult task. The design for the installation at the Gallery VŠUP used a relatively small space to evoke the situation where many drawings originated. A dimmed atmosphere of calm and quiet is a suggestion for the visitors to try to find an intimate approach to the collection. An old table made of fir wood and one chair are borrowed from the house where Karlíková lived and worked. Video sequences of approximately 150 drawings projected on a white sheet of paper lying on the table convey a sense of touch as if browsing through the drawings. These virtual images are accompanied by several original scrolls - horizontal banners of large size. A long static sequence into the dawning rural scenery of a forest or meadow creates the impression of a particular place and at the same time symbolically evokes cyclical rhythms of fading of darkness and light. The view into a landscape at dawn is accompanied by a composition of field recordings made in countryside.

O.K.Song of the turkey, 2004, pencil on paper

For many years Karlíková stubbornly used to get up early in the morning to scratch the surface of the dozens of drawing papers by immediate captures of impressions of seemingly ordinary birds songs or the buzzing of insects. The genuine value of those drawings, prints and paintings does not consist in the elegant gesture or virtuosity of handwriting in a patchwork of lines. They are rooted in her demand to communicate with the landscape, to capture intuitively the touch of inner pulsations and flow of a universal language, shared by people, animals, all living creatures. We are still in the thrall of the traditions of logocentric culture, based on the assumption that language as a formalized system of signs is an exclusively human (or transcendental) phenomenon, assuming that no other animal can really understand the speech or communication of other beings. This position separates us from a world woven of colors, shapes, movements, vibrations and structures. What is essential is that people would remain indifferent or even deaf to the musicality of the universe of nonhuman sounds. The world is permanently “speaking” to us, and we are constantly responding by polluting it with the industrial noise of machines. The growing interest in the work of Olga Karlíková suggests that this paradigm has in recent decades slowly started to disintegrate.

Dagmar Šubrtová, Miloš Vojtěchovský

Vít Zavadil, Slavík obecný, Nightingale, from CD Audible landscapes.

O.K.Bird songs, inkt on paper, 1993

O.Karlíková, foto by Dagmar Hochová, 1999?

On the occasion of the exhibition is a limited edition of released audio recordings from a collection of birds and frogs by ornithologist Vit Zavadil, who collaborated with the artist on this topic.

concept of the exhibition: Dagmar Šubrtová, Milos Vojtěchovský in cooperation with Olga Jeřábkovávideo: Milos Vojtěchovský, Michal Kindernay, Lenka Dolanová, Markéta Cílečková.




video editing: Michal Kindernay, programming: Krystof Pešekfield recordings: Miloš Vojtěchovský, english correction: Lloyd Dunn, installation: Dagmar Šubrtová, Milos Vojtěchovský, Michal Kindernay, Kryštof Pešek, Ondřej Vavrečka.
a view of the installation
public is invited to submit the videos of dawning landscapes, which will be incorporated in the current installation. technical conditions: static sequence, HD video, mpeg4, footage minimal 35 min. SD card.

CD: recordings: Vit Zavadil, sound editing: Stanislav Abraham, graphic design: Michal Kořán