“I was interested in the intimacy of the illusions that tried to amaze the viewer.” (Adéla Svobodová, 2005)
Subtle but distinct interventions are characteristic of Adéla Svobodová’s free works and graphic design, and indeed of the Ládví group that she is a part of. She acquired a natural education within a circle of friends present at the inauguration of the tranzitdisplay gallery, co-founded by her brother Tomáš Svoboda. She went on to supplement this with a formal education. She looks for new possibilities of communication and the basis of her art is conceptual. She works with video, drawing and text.
There is a ludic quality to many of her works, sometimes in displaced form where the game is turned into competition. She was already focussing her criticism on competition while at art school. She dreamed up several absurd disciplines in which it was possible to try to win first place. A similar charge is contained in the video Quiz (2005). Indistinguishable parts of objects are shot full on, while the audio background represents a countdown producing adrenalin in the observer and involving them in the event. After the first example the aim is to guess the next. The video Tulip, with which she participated in a joint show with Jiří Thýn (Jelení Gallery, Prague, 2004), is somewhat exceptional in her work, though the principle of the imperceptible event remains the same. This is an almost balladic picture in which the petals of tulips are cut into regular shapes in slow motion to the background of moving music. Rational interventions highlight irrational actions. A different facet of Svobodová’s work is the textual video O Art (Jelení Gallery, Prague, 2006), in which the artist selected statements by Czech and foreign artists from different articles and interviews and created a loop. Every statement is linked with the name of the person who said it and quotes are created that on the television screen function as a form of textual discourse.
The motif of lightening the load of a rational world defined by numbers that pervades her work featured in the title of her exhibition at Gallery 35m2 (Prague, 2008) 4=5. Last year she and her brother were approached for a joint exhibition in the Ferdinand Baumann Gallery (Prague). They decided to use the principles of Dadaism and surrealism and created an automatic text based on the game Le Cadavre Exquis, which also gave rise to the title of the installation Sběrtel nápadů / Collector of Ideas. In this exhibition the rules of the game are used to generate content that according to surrealist manifestos is in principle opposed to rationality.
