Květa Pacovská’s work has become widely known for its unusual aesthetics and above all for the entire range of the artist’s outstanding illustrations, which are close to free art. The distinctive images, which for many viewers and readers remain redolent of childhood, are characterised by humour, exaggeration, but also by careful composition, colour scheme and work with shape. It is on the latter that the depictions of individual characters – dysmorphic figures, both human and animal, who usually feature a large nose in addition to a big smile – are built. The smile is also characteristic of the photographic portraits of the artist herself, still the most famous Czech illustrator in the world, but also an artist and teacher who has received many accolades for her work.
Pacovská was born in Prague into a family of an opera singer and language teacher, and art and writing have always meant a lot to her. Nevertheless, it was her grandmother she often recalled, with whom even ordinary activities such as baking cakes was a creative affair. However, the family was impacted directly by the Second World War, in which Pacovská’s father died, and Pacovská herself was forced to drop out of high school and did not re-enter the State School of Graphic Arts until 1945. Two years later, however, she was accepted to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague to study in the painting studio led by Emil Filla. Composing geometric shapes, a characteristic feature of her work, seemed to be natural for a graduate of the studio of the leading Czech cubist and member of the Osma group. Pacovská later said that she felt herself to be a painter above all, because that was the discipline she had studied. In the end, however, she did not draw strict lines between the spheres she pursued, namely illustration, sculpture, painting and printmaking, and viewed illustration as a form of painting in books, where it was accorded a specific space.
At art school, Pacovská met her husband, the artist Milan Grygar, with whom she had two sons. The older son Ondřej is a graphic designer, and the younger, Štěpán, is a photographer. It was for them, she says, that she created her first illustrations for children’s books. These very quickly became popular and were often also included in children’s magazines Mateřídouška (Thyme) and Sluníčko (Sunshine). Overseas, Pacovská received much attention with her book Eins, fünf, viele (1992), in which she combined artwork with typography. The original and playful depictions of numerals quickly gained popularity in other countries around the world. Her contribution to graphic design was recognised in 2000 when Pacovská was awarded the Critics’ Prize at the International Biennial Brno.
In addition to illustrations, for the whole of her life Pacovská worked on her own art, both panting and sculpture. In both forms she worked with a similar colour scheme dominated by red, black and white. She covered her canvases with rhythmically structured surfaces, geometric shapes and unusual abstract compositions. Her sculptures also worked with the principle of balanced composition and strong, often contrasting colours. Between 1995 and 1997, she worked on a project for the garden of the Chihiro Art Museum Azumino in Japan, where she placed large boulders in an adjacent meadow, covered on one side with painted figures. These tower over a pond that follows the contour of the stone, giving the impression of a water filled imprint. At the same time, the boulders, with their geometrically conceived paintings with numbers and carefully chosen colour combinations, correspond to the surrounding landscape and the entire concept of the museum.
Pacovská has also published several artist’s books. She won the 1993 Golden Letter Award for most beautiful book for Papier Paradise, published as a tribute to Kurt Schwitters. The book L’infini, on the other hand, is based on abstraction and is the outcome of the artist’s lifelong exploration of the limits of the motif of the circle, which, without beginning or end, signifies duration. The observation of shapes, their symbolism and possibilities is one of the distinctive features of her work. This was reflected in a major exhibition organised by the Prague City Gallery in 2015 at the Municipal Library, which followed on from an exhibition of Pacovská’s paintings and sculptures in Taipei.
Pacovská’s free art, but especially her illustrations, continue to appeal to diverse audiences all around the world. They embody a distinctive poetics that for many is representative of a certain imaginative tradition characteristic of Czech art. Composed, stylised figures with unclear shapes and multilayered messages, which in the hands of other artists can often give an unsettling impression, possess in Pacovská’s hands a playful character. The artist herself recalled that during her childhood, books for children appeared in Czech households illustrated mainly, though not exclusively, by Jiří Trnka and Josef Lada, artists who are also appreciated abroad for their original poetic, albeit formally quite different, designs. Pacovská cited the American writer Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories as her favourite book from childhood. In 1965, she illustrated the book herself. Pacovská embodied the fulfilment of her own dream that illustrations of children’s books should be beautiful, a fact that explains the ongoing popularity of her work today.
