JINDRA VIKOVA / MADONNA MIA

Exhibition concept: Jindra Viková, Radek Wohlmuth
Exhibition curator and texts: Radek Wohlmuth
Special consultancy: Radim Vondráček
Graphic design: Studio Bušek+Dienstbier
Production and exhibition design: Dušan Seidl

The title of the selective retrospective exhibition Madonna mia is imbued with a subtle ambiguity that reflects the manner in which Jindra Viková has long perceived the subjects of femininity, motherhood and human emotionality. The Italian possessive adjective “mia” may suggest a close, intimate, personal being – my madonna. However, it can also be read as a sigh, an exclamation, an expression of amazement or sentiment that emerges in moments of intense feelings. And finally, in the context of Jindra Viková’s artwork, this may even be a playful cultural trap because as an artist she essentially never shuts herself into a single interpretational formula.

The exhibition thematizes various visual forms of the Madonna but not as a codified religious symbol. Jindra Viková perceives the Madonna much more as a universal image of a woman in different life situations – as a young girl, a mother, an ageing woman but also as a vulnerable but also strong being, as a figure that bears the experience of love, care and empathy as well as of doubt, cunning and defiance. In Viková’s creations, traditional iconography appears as a point of departure which she subsequently disrupts, reimagines and enhances with a contemporary message. The Madonna can thus become a woman exposed to everyday pressures, a mother seeking balance between herself and her child, or a symbol of the deeper principle of connection that extends beyond a particular story.

Typically in her works, Jindra Viková interchanges straightforward visual language and hyperbole that at times is almost invisible, other times much more apparent. While she can work with humour, she never completely makes light of the theme itself; rather, in using humour, she alludes to a specific sort of liberating optics that facilitates a “different” kind of interpretation. Her “Madonnas” can be both touching and ironic, as much as noble and altogether ordinary. It is this variability that represents one of the characteristic features of Viková’s creative output, as she does not shy away from a playfulness that enables her to embrace her themes openly and without prejudice.            

The diversity of meaning is also directly reflected in the range of techniques employed. Jindra Viková is known mainly as a ceramic sculptress whose works reflect a combination of fragility and solidity, as well as intuition and precise modelling. Her preferred materials – ceramic and porcelain – allow her to capture faces and figures that may seem both archaic and contemporary, as if they carried within them the memory of bygone cultures yet at the same time were reacting to today’s world. For the past decades, however, the artist has been mostly engaged in intermedia art. She creates watercolours and photograms, but also employs unusual techniques such as finger drawing which, like modelling, offers immediacy and the physical contact with the material, as well as assemblages and linear spatial drawings made of wire and found objects. Each technique brings her a different kind of visual perception and together with it also the opportunity to convey a given theme in a certain manner.