Exhibition organizers Moravská galerie v Brně Arbor vitae Author of the project Dušan Brozman Exhibition design Pavel Kolíbal Graphic design Helena Šantavá Installation Martin Ondruš, Svatopluk Máša Production of the exhibition Miroslava Pluháčková Promotion Hana Doležalová, Simona Juračková, Eva Maňasová
In the late 1950's, Eva Kmentová created female figures in relief-like morphology. They are represented in intimate poetic situations, abounding in tenderness, joy and care. The figures contain a promise of future blossoming. The works stem from the artist's insight into her own life, from listening to her soul rather than from observed external situations. In some aspects they resemble diaries; a struggle for form is not an issue here. After this period of neo-classicism, Kmentová passed through a cubist phase when she worked with generously rendered forms, followed by the informel in the early 1960's, so deeply ingrained in the Czech tradition. In the works inspired by the informel she first expressed existential anxiety, in surprisingly hard and aggressive fashion, though offset by her sensitive approach. Work with imprints and the expression wellspring of pop art (a shift from sculptures to objects, twodimensional painted monochrome forms and the use of texts in drawings and objects) opened for her a path from the baroque anxiety into a world with a space for playfulness and lightness, yet without depriving her daily work of its urgency. Imprints or casts of objects and people, traces of physical contacts, bear memories of objects surrounding the artist, of those close to her and of herself, her fingers and lips. The volume of a body preserved in matter, be it abandoned, negative or positive, gives eternal evidence of the presence of what once shaped it. This direct touch and the physicality connected with it were to become key moments in the artist's oeuvre, in all sorts of modifications. When Eva Kmentová fell ill in 1974, she mainly dedicated herself to work with paper, in the form of drawings and objects. Paper became for the sculptress the medium through which she expressed herself. With Sisyphus-like laboriousness, she would glue square on square until they produced a cube. The wrinkling of her "crumplages" resembles skin; paper sheaths and roses fated to turn yellow, be buried under dust and wither with time passing turn into ephemeral mementos of life. Dušan Brozman