Naděžda Plíšková
27/06/24–01/09/24

Cabinet of Curiosities, which is part of the exhibition How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story, introduces the visitor to the beginnings of Karel Tutsch's collecting through the first section of ex libris - a collection of small purpose prints, the logical continuation of which was the expansion of interest in free graphic art. The Cabinet of Curiosities will gradually introduce individual artists and their works on paper, which are an indispensable part of the collection.

Naděžda Plíšková was a printmaker, ceramic artist and poet from the generation of women who attended art school in the 1950s – most of whom worked in the shadows of their male contemporaries, in an unequal struggle for time, space and the chance to fully devote themselves to their art. Plíšková’s works are an “unsentimental and sober report on reality, seen with ironic detachment and a significant dose of humour, but also with an unflinching, almost brutal, honesty” (Věra Jirousová). Her naturalistic poetics drew on the “beer-and-pub” philosophy of the Crusaders’ School of Pure Humour Without Jokes, of which she was a member and also the only female artist in an otherwise male-dominated group.

In her etchings and drypoints, Plíšková arranged realistically rendered details of objects and situations from life into neo-surrealistic scenes. Her works confront us with the world of the “ideal” woman: cooking dinner, sewing and re-sewing not just clothes but also her own body in order to preserve the perfect beauty of Botticelli’s new-born Venus. Nor did she hesitate to reveal the secret of the Mona Lisa’s hair or to portray her husband as a perfectly ironed shirt.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Plíšková created small ceramic sculptures and large-scale objects which she used in performances at art openings – e.g., 7 Litres of Goulash Soup at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague. Her promising career was put on hold by a ban on exhibiting during Normalisation. In response to this difficult situation, she began making small bookplate with images of butterflies as a symbol of fragile ephemeral beauty. Other recurring themes in her work are injury and gross manipulation. Deformations are clumsily fixed using wire – which, however, becomes a cage, a kind of immobilising prison. After suffering a serious injury in 1982, Plíšková returned to her earlier writing of poetry. Her raw and radically personal poems are full of hurtful love interlaced with hate, or with overheard pub ramblings that she deliberately stylised to the point of absurdity. She fought the crushing weight of everyday banality with the words of other writers, poets, philosophers and friends, written all in capital letters.

The Karel Tutsch Collection contains a large set of 26 bookplates which Plíšková made in the 1970s. Most are from 1973, when she became a full member of the Society of Bookplate Collectors and Friends. Besides these small prints, Tutsch also kept a representative series of her prints from 1966–1969, 1977 and 1981.