artists

Lenka Klodová

Sexuality, Love and Motherhood form an indivisible triangle in Lenka Klodova's work. Her interest in the female body - pure and innocent, sensuous or pornographic - may seem obsessive. But she is not interested in the corporal body, just as she is not concerned with the erotic spectacle of curved breasts or open crotches (plenty of these can be found at newsstands and in the film industry). The body is understood as an open structure with multiple meanings and forms in diverse contexts, and if she does make use of pornography in her work, she doesn't do it in order to shock us, but rather with the objective of disrupting the perception of the female body as an object of pleasure....
The woman, put on a pedestal by Western culture, is usually beautiful, naked and defenseless. Klodova argues against this ideal model of womanhood found in museums, galleries, advertisements and in European art history publications. Although Klodova demonstrates the absurdity of such presentations of womankind, her "ideal" is by no means an asexual woman warrior wearing blue stockings. The nakedness of a woman is not the opposite of freedom; motherhood is not the opposite of erotic desire and intellectual maturity."

from Oh God, A Woman!, by Martina Pachmanova (from the catalog Lenka Klodova: Pregnant Songs, published by Divus, 2005)

Since 1999, Lenka Klodova has been investigating the theme of women through the sensitive material of the pornography industry. Fascinating are the variety of ideas anchored in that one theme, the simplicity of the material, and constant invention in the field of method. Lenka devotes herself with the same seriousness to sculptural work as to paper-cutting; her works range from monumental realizations, like Miluji (I Love, 2001) in Neratovice, to flat "sculptures" made out of cardboard dressed up in tailored clothes, but there are also samizdat mystifications and body performances. All these methods of creation mingle with and complement each other. The work with porno-magazines is developed further in the samizdat magazines, Briza (Birches, 2000) and Kominy (Chimneys, 2001). The new magazine Krasne holky v akci (Beautiful Girls in Action, 2004) complements the Miluji installation by rendering it ironic; it is a photo-essay in which Lenka and her friends, Helenka and Lucie, work on this sculpture while dressed as prostitutes. Wearing high heels and workers' goggles they hammer wedges into monumental stone blocks, move them with a crane and grind at them with a hand grinder. It was as if they were constructing an advertisement for their erotic service. That adds another slightly ticklish dimension to the multivalent outcry "I love!" and the photo-documentation shifts the realization of a sophisticated art work to the level of a student prank. This is not the first time that such self-irony, something that seems to undermine artwork's seriousness, appears in Lenka's work."

from When Everybody Finally Somehow Fell Asleep... by Pavlina Morganova (from the catalog Klodova: Pregnant Songs, published by Divus, 2005)


Authentically Lived Stereotypes: The Hidden Phenomenon of of Marriage
Lenka Klodova, Umelec 1/2005
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About Children
Lenka Klodova, Umelec 1/2005
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All Dolled Up
Lenka Klodova, Umelec 1/2005
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Lenka Klodova studied at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts, receiving her doctorate in 2005. She works in a wide range of media - sculpture, installation, photography and performance and has exhibited extensively both at home and abroad. Aside from solo exhibitions, Lenka is also active as a member of the art collective Matky a Otcove (Mothers and Fathers), which she founded in 2001 along with fellow graduates of the Applied Arts Academy, Lucie Krejcova, Marek Rejent and Martin Pec. Most recently, Lenka exhibited her new sculpture entitled Fountain in London at Divus Unit 30 and is one of the participating artists at the Sculptural Quadrennial in Riga, Latvia.