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