International conference
The Traces of Eva Kmentová – The Local and International Context

As part of the accompanying programme to Eva Kmentová's exhibition, an international conference focusing on the local and global context of the artist's work will take place in the Procházka Hall on 3 - 4 November. The conference will be live streamed and simultaneously translated.

You can find the stream in English on our YouTube: Friday, Saturday

PLEASE NOTE: The conference will be held in the exhibition during normal opening hours. We apologize for any inconveniences and thank you for your understanding.

The work of Eva Kmentová (1928–1980) is well known in her home country. At the very latest since her untimely death, she has become a legend of Czech postwar art and an important representative of a strong generation of women artists. In the intervening years, her work and the various stages in her career have been subjected to a gradual assessment and re-assessment. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, interpretations of Kmentová’s art and life were done in the spirit of the era’s feminist ideas: The political liberalization of the 1970s and the ideological control of the 1970s seemed to be reflected in the evolution of her sculptural work. After the collapse of the Prague Spring, previously hopeful developments were curtailed by outside circumstances, and a promising career on the domestic art scene was shunted onto a dead-end track so that only private circles of friends could follow her work. With the re-establishment of contacts and the renewed internationalization of Czech art after 1989, numerous authors have repeatedly identified similarities between Eva Kmentová’s life and career and those of other greatly appreciated women artists of the 1960s from other countries (Alina Szapocznikow, Eva Hesse, Maria Bartuszová). Formal similarities between some of these artists’ works are accompanied by similar contents as well, but also by many original solutions. The point of this comparison is not just to clarify Czech art history’s view of Eva Kmentová but also to encourage reflection from an outside perspective.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

FRIDAY

2pm
Afternoon session: Welcome, introductory word
Moderated by Terezie Petišková, director, House of Arts Brno

2:15pm
Ida Muráňová, Alice Němcová
Authors of the book Kmentová do kapsy (A Pocket Kmentová), National Gallery Prague
A presentation of a book designed to introduce the work of Eva Kmentová to children and other readers. The publication is part of a new series by Prague’s National Gallery on modern and contemporary art.

2:45pm
Nela Kvíčalová
Department of Art History, Palacký University, Olomouc
Eva Kmentová and Olbram Zoubek’s involvement in shaping public space in the 1960s through the examples of their decorative work on Brno’s Janáček Theatre and the Theatre of the Working People in Gottwaldov. Special attention will be paid on the circumstances surrounding the Brno project.

3:15pm
Jana Kořínková
Art historian, Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology; director, Vutium publishing house
Realized and unrealized designs by Eva Kmentová created in relation to the work of Brno architects Zdeněk Řihák (1924–2006) and Ivan Ruller (1926–2018). The lecture will focus on the working conditions for artists in the second half of the 1960s and the role of architects in selecting and realizing works of art in the public space.

3:45–4pm
Break

4 pm
Late afternoon session: Welcome
Moderated by Helena Musilová, chief curator, Prague City Gallery

4pm
Denisa Kujelová
Art historian; artistic director and chief curator, Fait Gallery, Brno, Department of Art History, Masaryk University in Brno
Eva Kmentová, Alina Szapocznikow, Hannah Wilke, and Physical Self-Conception As Part of Identity Formation. The lecture will explore the era’s emancipatory efforts relating to the legitimization of women artists and the inclusion of their viewpoints, strategies, and experiences into the art-historical discourse in the face of an environment in Czechoslovakia that was quite ambiguous about feminism.

4:30pm
Alice Němcová
Curator of the Collection of 19th-Century Art and Classical Modernism, National Gallery Prague
Ephemerality, Empty Space, Vanitas: Eva Kmentová and Félix González-Torres. To what extent can one draw a line from Dutch still-lifes (scenes of “absent human presence”) and vanitas to the art of these two twentieth-century artists?

5pm
Gabriela Garlatyová
Art historian; curator, Municipal Gallery in Rimavská Sobota; Technical University of Košice; Maria Bartuszová Archives, Košice
Maria Bartuszová: Stones, Branches, Leaves, and Eggshells As the Building Blocks of the World in Which We Live. The lecture explores the affinities and specific characteristics of the theme of nature in the art of Maria Bartuszová and Eva Kmentová, in particular the artists’ casts of natural materials such as leaves, eggshells, and raindrops.

5:30pm
Recapitulation of first day

SATURDAY

10am
Morning session: Welcome
Moderated by Zuzana Jakalová, Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology; co-author of the publication Eva Kmentová

10:15am
Amauta García and David Camargo, in English
Visual artists, Mexico
A presentation of the project The Weight of Millions of Years Flowing, which the artists realized upon an invitation from the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany. Their project, which was based on an interpretation of Kmentová’s sculpture Knees from the museum’s collections, focused mainly on her relationship to time.

10:45
Marta Dziewanska, online, in English
Art historian, curator, and editor, KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium
Counter Forms: Eva Kmentová, Maria Bartuszová, Feliza Bursztyn and Alina Szapocznikow. The lecturer, an expert on the art of Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, relates the work of Eva Kmentová to that of several other representatives of Eastern European and world sculpture and tries to find relationships beyond visual similarities.

11:15am
Petra Lexová
Art history seminar, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno; Institute of Art and Culture Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice
Pillows, Sheets, and a Soft Body: The Quality of Touch and the Touched Object as a Central Motif of Sculptural Production. The lecture explores the formal and material approaches that Eva Kmentová chose in order to achieve fragility, ephemerality, and an emphasis on the tactile side of the work. The lecturer also asks whether we can speak of Kmentová’s imprinted body as a woman’s body.

11:45am
Lucia Gregorová Stach
Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava
The Present Moment as a Specific Work Method in the Art of Central European Women Artists in the 1960s and 1970s (Eva Kmentová, Alina Szapocznikow, Jana Želibská, Maria Bartuszová). The central focus of the lecture is on the use of prints, outlines and breath, with emphasis on their ability to capture the present moment and to overcome the limitations of time, both specifically and metaphorically.

12:15–1:30pm
Break

1:30pm
Afternoon session: Welcome
Moderated by Tomáš Pospiszyl, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, curator of the exhibition Eva Kmentová

13:45
Pavel Pyś, online, in English
Curator and art historian, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
Curator Pavel Pyś is the author of the international traveling exhibition Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s, which will be hosted by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 11 November 2023 until 10 March 2024. In his talk, Pyś describes the exhibition and the context in which it shows the work of Eva Kmentová.

2:15pm
Marianna Placáková
Institute for Art History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague; editor of the journal Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones (Academy of Fine Arts in Prague)
Feminism in Socialism? Women Artists of the 1960s and the “Women’s Question.” The speaker studies the rise of feminist consciousness among Czechoslovak women artists, which she identifies as occurring in the late 1960s as part of the reform process in Czechoslovakia. Her presentation places various women artists within the context of discussions regarding gender equality – which, even though no such discussions took place on the art scene, were nevertheless a topic covered by the period press.

2:45pm
Karolina Majewska-Güde, in English
Art historian, researcher, and curator, Berlin
Unmaking Sculpture: Sculptural Practices of Women Artists in East-Central Europe and Their Feminist Art Histories. The lecture focuses on models of historical narratives of artistic developments in socialist Europe within the context of the transformation of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. The feminist aspect of this process relates to the critique introduced into artistic practice by women’s experience from a perspective of gender, social, and artistic marginalization – but also affirmation.

3:15pm
Conference recapitulation