Eva Prokopcová

Eva Prokopcová has lived and worked in České Budějovice since the 1980s. This makes her one of only few artists who have managed to maintain a high quality of output and to achieve renown while operating outside the main centre. In 1992 she had a solo exhibition in the Prague gallery Via Art, and in 1997 a retrospective of her work at the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery. However, the real breakthrough only came in 2000 with her new era of geometric fields. This was followed by many exhibitions at prestigious venues around the Czech Republic (Dům umění České Budějovice, Galerie Bayer & Bayer in Prague, Galerie města Plzně, Galerie Caesar in Olomouc and the Galerie Malovaný dům in Třebíč), and in 2006 her first retrospective accompanied by an extensive monograph at the Egon Schiele Art Centre in her native Český Krumlov, reprised at the Galerie Klatovy / Klenová.

Prokopcová’s journey to fine art was not the easiest. Having left grammar school she failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and instead went to the stone sculpting school in Hořice. Here she met her future husband and their relationship brought an end to her studies. However, they had nowhere to live, and so after the birth of their daughter she had to return to her parents in České Budějovice. In order that the family could be together, she applied to study architecture and lived in a hall of residence with her husband. However, after three years she decided this was not the subject she wanted to pursue. She began to work as a technical draftswoman in the sphere of care for monuments, and in 1977, aged almost thirty, she was at last accepted by AVU in Prague. She studied at the studio led by professor Jan Smetana, the most prominent lecturer at the school at that time, and completed her studies with a series of paintings on the theme of life in a housing estate, inspired by her own experience.

After graduating from art school, her personal life was thrown into turmoil. After her divorce, she moved into her mother’s place in České Budějovice, again on a housing estate, where she systematically continued her creative work. However, in 1989 she lost her studio and her apartment became a storeroom for her paintings where it was impossible to live and work. She suffered serious mental health problems, which only disappeared after she acquired another studio in an industrial building on the outskirts of the city and her situation stabilised.

The first significant stage in Prokopcová’s development is a series of paintings on the theme of housing estates from 1983–87, an offshoot of her diploma project. In them, she responds to the depersonalised environment in which a person is trimmed to the size of a minimal apartment and “walled up in concrete”, as the title of one of her works reads. In 1987 she effected an about turn and looked to her inner world. Henceforth, external events appear only indirectly, transformed by her inner experience of them. Her style is an abstract morphology formulated by an expressive, physically experienced painting with a richly shaded style ranging from impasto deposits of coloured matter, via a raw flow of paint and geometric ornament, to subtly drawn motifs. Her painting took on a procedural character and works emerged gradually, almost autochthonously, from an immediate mood and the artist’s evolving reactions to its individual phases.

Some of the paintings from the late 1980s are reminiscent of diagrams, and this is related to the activities of her partner at the time, a biologist, whom she helped redraw graphic diagrams. In other paintings, fragments of text appear that give the impression of being excerpts from non-existent letters (e.g. “Nepřekážej smutku / Tvoje milá” (“Don’t run away from sadness, yours truly”) in Nepřekážej smutku, 1995) and reflect her mental state at the time. In 1996 she created an interesting series of four works on rough jute, using bags she had found on a walk, which she laboriously modified into a visual background. She placed the raw natural material, which she left exposed with its exotic inscriptions and rough seams, in contrast to the radiant painting materials.

In the wake of 2000, for several years she created an extensive series of works in which small dots of paint are applied directly from the tube to a monochrome substrate and arranged in a raster with the form of curved lines. This creates an impression of convex or concave surfaces resembling force fields. The close physical contact she had with the image during its creation and the connection to its energy were crucial for Prokopcová. When she eventually relinquished this subject after several years, it was in order to return to abstract, colourist painting, which she sometimes complements with figural motifs.

Eva Prokopcová. Texty Marcel Fišer, Hana Jirmusová, Eva Prokopcová. Český Krumlov 2007.

Autobiografický text v monografii Eva Prokopcová, Český Krumlov 2007.