Olomouc, Czech Republic
Museum of Modern Art at the Olomouc Museum of Art
Magdalena Jetelová’s work has always been antipodal, bringing to a point of suspension such opposites as displacement and precise coordinates, imbalance and equilibrium, occlusion and disclosure. Even before her emigration from the former Czechoslovakia in 1985, her work was déraciné, uprooted and destabilized by its resistance to the strictures imposed on artistic practice by the communist regime. Yet, in the years before she left Prague, she had already developed the basis of an adaptable vocabulary, a lexicon recombinant and transformative, transitory and insubordinate. This exhibition functioned as a retrospective, an ambitious collection of new work, a multi-gallery series of installations, and an activist call to other artists in Central and Eastern Europe. Characteristically, three of the new works…see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.