Alena Nadvornikova (born 1942), Dva Svety (two Worlds), 1979, Indian Ink On Paper

Alena Nadvornikova (born in 1942)
Dva svety (Two worlds), 1979
Indian ink on paper
50 x 32 cm
frame 60 x 40 cm

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 actively participated in the surrealist movement stemming from the Prague Surrealists Group founded in 1934 and bringing together personalities from the literary and artistic world. Its members adhered to André Breton's second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) while developing their own specificities. The Prague Surrealist Group has endured over generations and still exists to this day. It is mainly structured around its magazine Analogon and has given rise to a plurality of aesthetics as evidenced 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), dean of Czech surrealism. This movement is a direct extension 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. While a student at the University of Olomouc, she took classes with theorist and photographer Vaclav Zykmund (1914-1984), whom she also assisted in his research. This meeting constitutes one of the significant events of his artistic journey.

A singular spirit, she developed an original artistic genre that she called “kresbobásně”: poems-drawings. She thus combines poetry and drawing which she considers to be two complementary disciplines. It is a spontaneous mechanism which consists of creating without premeditation. She began to compose them upon returning 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. Produced in a critical spirit towards any form of intellectual interpretation of the work, the artist's spontaneous drawings allow an infinite number of compositions. Although some may seem disturbing, they all have a great force that makes them stick in your memory at first glance. Alena Nadvornikova's drawings sometimes go against what may seem pleasant to us from the outside and their reading requires special attention.

In her apartment in Prague, the artist creates a total work of art since she makes this living space the support of an immense intuitive composition made of lines which connect together all the elements such as the doors, the pipes of heating, furniture or even paintings. Works related to the three works that we present are kept in the collections of Czech and Slovak institutions.