Hana Purkrábková: From life — A Retrospective Exhibition of Sculptural Ceramics and Human Figures

This exhibition celebrates the sculptor and ceramist Hana Purkrábková, focusing on her human figure sculptures and applied ceramics. The exhibition explores themes of human life, its environment, and the analogies she drew from her intimate observations of people and animals.

The exhibition highlights the work of Hana Purkrábková (1936–2019), a significant artist from the generation that emerged in the 1960s, known for her ceramic figure sculpture. Purkrábková's art deeply engages with human life and its surroundings, often including the animals that were close to her, drawing poignant analogies between these worlds. Her sensitive and spontaneous approach to modeling clay, guided by keen observation and visual memory, allowed her to capture unguarded gestures and everyday situations, infused with her characteristic humor and irony. Her figures and creatures often reflect human weaknesses, deceitfulness, emptiness, and aggression, prompting introspection about ourselves and the contemporary world. Purkrábková's artistic form development was rooted in 'potter's' principles, building bodies from the inside out to convey physicality and punctuated by detail and color. The exhibition also features her large-format drawings and working sketches, integral to understanding her distinctive artistic expression, which is fundamentally humane and socially aware.