untitled
and Country Ufo
series
of objects
1998
mix
media
variable
size
I
made these sculptural objects a few months before I started my first
year at art academy. In two cases they consist of a wooden object and
a branch onto which I attached pieces of artificial leather from old
car seats with a needle and thread. At the time my dad was running a
scrapyard, so I had relatively free access to this material. In
another case, the object consists of polyurethane foam shaped into a
cylinder wrapped in light ochre leatherette, probably from the
ceiling of one of the Eastern European vehicles that were being
consigned to scrapyards by Czechs en masse in the latter half of the
1990s. The series also includes an object reminiscent of a flower
that is complicated in terms of materials, comprising a decorative
aluminium profile, an old galvanized funnel, part of a plastic spool
and a child’s skirt. This is all sewn into black artificial leather
and chemlon polyamide upholstery fabric. I made several other similar
objects, but they have been irretrievably lost. One of them was a
metre-long beam with several shallow chainsaw grooves. It was
decorated with a fringe of thin, ornamental tassels. Small, black
hairpin legs had also been inserted into the corners, blending with
the black leatherette so that the object appeared to levitate. On the
occasion of the exhibition The Aspiration of Foreign Bodies (2022), I
asked František Hanousek and Jakub Hájek to make a replica. The two
artists created a version of the object that was smaller than the
original and differed from it in several details.
photo: Ondřej Polák