A guided tour of Ivana Šrámková’s exhibition

Final guided tour of Ivana Šrámková’s exhibition ‘Glass and Sculptures’.

The glass artist Ivana Šrámková trained under Stanislav Libenský and specialises in cast glass 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 suggests a logical connection to 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 without superfluous detail, they possess, in addition to their undeniable artistic quality, a remarkable vital energy 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.

Ivana Šrámková’s current exhibition offers visitors to the Nisa Factory Gallery a wonderful opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of this exceptional body of work, which has its roots in this region yet is familiar to both specialists and the general public far beyond our country’s borders. Ivana Šrámková has held over fifty exhibitions both at home and abroad and has taken part in more than a hundred group exhibitions. Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the National Gallery in Prague, the North Bohemian Museum in Liberec, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, the Museum of Modern Art in Lausanne, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, and other institutions and private collectors.