Be creative with Ivana Šrámková

Ivana Šrámková (*1960) is an author with deep ties to our region. She was born in Liberec, grew up in Turnov, and as a child travelled to Malá Skála for private painting lessons; she completed her secondary education at the glassmaking school in Železný Brod (1976–1980), and spent her summer holidays at a cottage in Frýdštejn. Over the years, she has developed a genuine connection to the local landscape, its natural beauty, the distinctive charm of timber-framed architecture, and the forgotten art of folk carpenters, stonemasons and sculptors. It is here, too, that she has found – and continues to find – powerful sources of inspiration for her artistic work.

A graduate of Stanislav Libenský’s school, she specialises in cast sculpture. Her work can be divided into two main categories: in her small-scale sculptures, she explores themes drawn primarily from the animal kingdom. In her large-scale, technically demanding works, she captures figurative forms, yet abstracts their shapes to create almost archetypal, monumental objects.

Since her youth, Ivana Šrámková has alternated between periods of glasswork and periods of painting. Her paintings bear the hallmarks of monumentality just as convincingly as they do traces of her individual style and the vivid touch of the artist’s hand. The intensely applied paint in her expressive figurative paintings evokes a logical connection with the painted glass of her early period. Although the paintings inspired by paper roses from a fairground shooting gallery are characterised by an economical style devoid of superfluous detail, they possess, in addition to their undeniable artistic quality, a remarkable vitality which, on a deeper level, conveys hidden messages that invite reflection. Furthermore, Ivana Šrámková’s meditative pictorial compositions, in which the immediate connection to observed reality fades away, provide the viewer with space for their own feelings.