Helena Lukášová

Helena Lukášová is one of the pioneers of digital sculpture. She is also concerned with another related phenomenon – artificial intelligence in the context of art, both on the Czech art scene and internationally. She focused on digital sculpture during her PhD studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (completed in 2009) from which she had received her MA degree in Sculpture under Professor Juraj Bártusz in 1996. The studio led by Juraj Bártusz was called the Studio of Free Creativity because it was open to all sorts of experimentation. At the end of the 1990s, Helena Lukášová travelled to the USA, and this trip greatly affected her further evolution as an artist. She spent six years in the United States, first studying and then working at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture in New Jersey where she got acquainted with digital sculpture. Thanks to the intensive time she divided between commissioned work performed in the institute’s workshops and her own work created in the same space, she gained skills that only few artists, let alone those from Central Europe, could attain.

Helena Lukášová takes a completely innovative approach to sculpture which is considered one of the most traditional artistic genres. Since 2003 she has been working at the Department of Visual Informatics (Faculty of Informatics, Brno University of Technology) as the head of the Graphic Design and Multimedia Studio. She uses sculpture and objects as a means to explore the world’s physical matter – literally and figuratively, both in reality and virtually. She navigates the virtual world with unseen confidence, while using new technologies as her sculptural instruments.

Some of her works eventually become real and tangible artefacts – such as the project Jsem Venuše (2014), for which she received the Rector’s Award of the Masaryk University in Brno. In this project, she drew the silhouette of her own body using a programme for creating artworks in a virtual environment that perceives real space using sensors. The resulting “Venuses”, i.e. the materialized contours of her own body created by this programme, gave rise to a series of 3D prints that were subsequently rendered in marble during the artist’s residency in Italy. The marble sculpture is now situated in a sculpture park in New Jersey, whose curator focuses specifically on works created using new technologies. However, some of Helena Lukášová’s works remain “only” in the realm of the virtual, or in augmented reality. By the time most of the world was forced to the online space by the pandemic, she had already made it her home.

A characteristic feature of her work are ambiguous or multivalent shapes of her objects. They often resemble extraterrestrial creatures, mutated aliens, amorphous beings that seem to have come from another planet. In fact, they often inhabit parallel, virtual realities whose existence is conditioned by technology. They are only visible by means of smart devices, most often those archaically called telephones. It is only thanks to them that the augmented reality appears and offers us an unexpected view of ordinary places. We can see, for example, the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, the Vegetable Market in Brno or a flower-trolley in front of Tate Modern, which we would never be able to do if we just stayed off-line.

The principle of mutated artwork derived from real shapes can also be found in the artist’s series of watercolours entitled Unnatural Selection (2019). The series works with variations created by artificial intelligence based on photographs. The interpretation of these “phantasmagoric” scenes is drawn by the human hand, producing an unsettling impression of mutated creatures of unknown species. It is as if our brains, looking at these watercolours, wanted to assemble the “correct” image of a human being or an animal. And yet we know that what is presented to us is exactly what we can see – a cluster creating a hazy reflection of our own human experience.

Helena Lukášová also pushed the physical boundaries of the human body during her participation in the collection by designer Denisa Nová (autumn/winter 2015/16), for which she created unique masks and a jewellery collection. The masks that were produced using 3D printing resembled parasitic creatures, mineral deposits covering the faces of the posing models. The central theme of a separate set of ornaments was the concept of Milagros, referring to votive objects known in Spanish and Latin American culture, which are supposed to grant wishes to their owners. The artist created miniature versions of various body parts of close family members using a 3D scanner. She cut the objects into pieces and reassembled them into various combinations. These creations were subsequently gilded to become exclusive fashion accessories.

A pivotal part of Helena Lukášová’s work is also her collaboration with her sister, photographer, theoretician and multi-genre artist Veronika Lukášová under the name HEVER. Their creative activities included a project called Research, as part of which they have been exploring dark matter – the matter of the universe – since 2018. By inventing her own form of this unknown substance, placing it in a real landscape and engaging human participants dressed in white coats to represent doctors, explorers and researchers, she has been creating a parallel story of a known, and yet undescribed substance.

Although Helena Lukášová is most often labelled as a sculptor, she combines various disciplines with the same ease as she pushes the boundaries of art itself. For her, new technologies are as natural as, for instance, a chisel for most sculptors. It is no exaggeration to say that her work plays a fundamental role in the development of art, or rather in the history of art. It is not difficult to imagine her name in an imaginary dictionary alongside the pioneers of digital sculpture. It can be expected that her endlessly innovative work will meet with even greater interest in the future.

Inua - cement sculpture, Grounds for Sculpture, NJ, USA, od 2001

2021
Sborník – Humain
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Článek ve sborníku makáme teď na tom) 2020
BARON TRENCK Nová tvář legendy
URBANOVÁ Petra, VACHŮT Petr, HLOUCHOVÁ Kateřina, JURDA Mikoláš, KOMOSNÝ Cyril Josef, LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena, OSTRÝ Ctibor
(Odborná kniha)
Rok: 2020, vydání: Vyd. první, počet stran: 189 s. 2018
Intuice
(Sborník)
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena Článek ve sborníku: 2017
Defining Pressure: Examining the State of Objects in Contemporary Making
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Sborník - aplikace nových technologií v sochařské praxi)
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Článek ve sborníku)
Trans_Forma / The Bone Phone
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Článek v odborném periodiku)
Trans_Forma / The Bone Phone
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena, MICHAEL Rees 2016
Umělecké realizace
Digitální výroba a nové podoby designu, konference Design na hranici, UTB Zlín
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Článek v odborném periodiku)
Uplatnění 3d modelování v sochařské praxi 2015
Ateliér grafického designu + multimédií Fakulty informatiky Masarykovy univerzity : Studio of Graphic Design + Multimedia Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena
(Článek v odborném periodiku Safe Place - katalog k projektu) 2014
NEWRON 0.97
CHMELÍK Jiří, KOZLÍKOVÁ Barbora, HUMPOLÍČEK Pavel, DOLEŽAL Milan, HOJNÝ Antonín, JAREŠOVÁ Miroslava, BELLA Ján, HROŠ Michal, ULBRICH Pavol, LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena, POUZAR Tomáš
Software 2012
Rekonstrukce podoby moravskotřebovské mumie. Antropologická analýza a vědecká rekonstrukce podoby obličeje
LUKÁŠOVÁ Helena, URBANOVÁ Petra
(Kapitola v knize)
Ve stínu pyramidy. Příběhy moravskotřebovské mumie, vydání: Vyd. 1, rok: 2012, počet stran: 6 s.

2020
N & N  Magazín pro Prahu a Berlín: O poznani a pevnych bodech, interview
Digitální baron, Computer časopis, interview 2016
Artmix, profilová prezentace, Česká televize
New Direction for 3D Printing, Core 77 (on-line), interview
Lushic, (on-line), interview