ADRIENA ŠIMOTOVÁ

A small exhibition of the works of Adriena Šimotová, titled A Graphite Angel after one of the paintings that was among the exhibited works, was organized by the Václav Chad Gallery two years after the author’s departure ... We know that Adriena’s passing away did not put an end to our encounters with her; it did not terminate the very live relationship that many of those, for whom her work has always been a source of fundamental experience with the creative essence of human existence and possible forms of its manifestation, had with her and her work. We know that our encounters with Adriena and her work can continue, if we pay attention to it. We would like this exhibition to be a contribution to this. And we would also like to make it happen in her spirit or in accordance with it – as many of us still remember very clearly, even in the last years of her life, her spirit never seemed to grow weaker, developing and maturing in a remarkable way.

Adriena Šimotová was one of the most respected figures in Czech art of the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. She was born in a mixed Czech and French family, connected with the Masarykian traditions of the First Republic. She studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the class of Josef Kaplický, where she also met her later husband, Jiří John, a distinguished graphic artist and painter. They belonged to the UB 12 group, along with Václav Boštík, Stanislav Kolíbal and others; they supported each other in overcoming period barriers in the increasingly secluded Czechoslovak society of the 1950s, shared hopes for the democratization of social life in the sixties as well as the disappointment resulting from its failure. The second half of the 1960s and the decade that followed represented a period that was particularly significant for the forming of Adriena; this period of personal and social pains and tests is generally regarded as a period in which her human and artistic originality, uniqueness and maturity originated. In these years and in the years that followed, with great consistency and concentration, she thematised human subjectivity under significant conditions and in relations that were relevant for her. With characteristic sensitivity to existential and hermeneutical aspects of personality, she developed her work into a distinctive artistic phenomenology of the human condition in general, the basic element of which was a multilateral reflection of the essence of an image and of visual communication. At the turn of the 1970s, after she, as a respected painter, abandoned traditional painting, the defining moments of her art form became perforation, transparency, and layering; she applied frottage in a unique way in her works, both when depicting people and objects, she worked with stencils, photographic image and changes of its role in relation to the individual or collective memory, with installation, with a serial moment of figuration and much more ... all these can be understood as gradual, logically interrelated steps on a path on which, together with Adriena and thanks to her, we can see (and in relation to her we continue to see) that what constitutes an image is not just the image itself, but also the reality that the image reveals and communicates. In the structure of the reflected conditions of the revelation of the apparent through imagination and communication mediated by imagination, the ethical and spiritual dimensions of work were of the greatest importance for Adriena – which is consistent with the fact that it was often manifested in dramatic forms. In varying degrees and in different ways we can observe it at various stages of her creative journey. I think that in the final periods of her life, during which she, despite suffering from poor health, continued to work, this became more evident and pronounced on an increasingly general scale. One example for many can be the words of the photographer Markéta Luskačová, who told me during one of our meetings that Adriena in her late years radiated light which she saw in such amounts only in the case of Josef Sudek.

In one of his interviews, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel emphasized that what was considerable in humans and sacred in them was the living ability to relate to the sacred, based on the recognition of the sanctity of existence. With her deep humanity, spiritual refinement, purity, quiet bravery and seeing kindness, Adriena Šimotová was one of the most convincing impersonations of this principle I have met so far.

Pavel Brunclík