Zdena Fibichová

Zdena Fibichová belonged to a talented generation of sculptors that gathered in Czechoslovakia in the post-war years at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, mainly in the studio of Josef Wagner. Fibichová was part of the second wave of students who began their studies at the start of the 1950s. Her classmates included Vladimír Preclík and Jan Hendrych. At that time, Czech art was seeking a link to pre-war modernism. A synthesis of these efforts was reflected in the work of the Trasa group, which Fibichová was a member of. However, unlike other sculptors, in her early works she did not look for prototypes in Czech cubism and the interwar avant-garde, but reached back further in time to ancient cultures and Mediterranean sculpture.

In her sculptures from the 1950s she is clearly searching for her own language, and like other artists she found this sometime around 1963. While Ráno / Morning (1958) reveals the influence of Josef Wagner, two years younger, the smoothly modelled Modelka ú Model (1960) and Sedící / Sitting (1961) now draw on a knowledge of post-war Italian sculpture, above all that of Marino Marini. Figuration was the starting point for all artists thanks to the relaxation of political pressure and the possibility of exhibiting during the 1960s. Most sculptors of this period underwent almost the same artistic development. In Fibichová’s this was the most productive and innovative period in her career. She tried out new possibilities in terms of both material and form. The goal was to reduce form to its elementary basics. The lyrical statuettes of women or couples gradually disappeared. To begin with the face was lost and only the shape of the head and chest remained, as in the case of the lyrically conceived Sedící/ Sitting. Later on still only the figure remains, without bodily features, as in several of the statuettes from the series of suspended Mikroplastik / Micro-Statues (1961–1962), in which the body is almost completed erased in such a way as to encourage maximum abstraction and stylisation.  

Micro-Statues is pivotal in Fibichová’s oeuvre in that it allowed her to break free from the figural theme, which she had been treating with more and more of a free hand. Since the statuettes in this series were modelled in plasticine, which allowed for an intuitive approach to shape, Fibichová arrived at a conception of sculpture as the direct expression of an idea, her own feelings and psychological states, and her work became more and more personal. Though we find similarities with the work of Eva Kmentová or Věra Janoušková, Fibichová’s sculptures are emotionally enclosed within themselves. It is this emotional introversion that made Fibichová a solitary figure on the art scene, even though during the 1960s she participated in several important sculpture exhibitions.

From 1963–1965 Fibichová most often turned to natural motifs (Lomikámen, Černobýl) and at the same time moved from ephemeral plaster in favour of easily modelled tin. The surface of the sculptures from this period is, in accordance with the informel aesthetic, disrupted by scratches and notches, as we see in Křídlo / Wing (1965). A turning point was Fibichová’s residency in France in 1965, where she began working with ceramic clay. This gave rise to the cycles Deníky / Diaries and Stély / Stele, which gave rise to the massive concrete and cement steles [a stele is a stone or wooden slab erected in the ancient world as a monument] of the latter half of the 1960s. Stély (1966–1968) are not smooth geometric shapes in the style of Zdeněk Palcr, but have their own life, with shots or buds piercing the hard material as though from within in an endeavour to burst open the work into space.

Fibichová enjoyed her greatest successes in the latter half of the 1960s. She had a number of solo exhibitions and worked on commissions for public spaces (in Horní Liboc and Zahradní město). In 1968 she was hit hard by the occupation and retired more and more into herself. She almost stopped creating. The following year she fell seriously ill and had to adapt her work, to which she slowly returned, to these new conditions. This meant moving away from the monumental steles to more intimate sculptures made mainly of plaster and clay. In the cycle Dopisy / Letters she attempted to work with relief, and returned to this in the series Vzkazy / Messages (1969), Z rodinného alba/ From a Family Album (1971) and in a series on the subject of housework (1970). She continued working in all of these cycles with clay in an unorthodox matter, perforating it, cutting it like paper and stitching it as though it were a fabric.  

Just as the period of normalisation began in Czechoslovakia, Fibichová moved out of Prague and her seclusion intensified. During the 1970s she began to used everyday items in her works (light bulbs, string, cans, etc.) that she transformed without change into sculptural objects (Pytlíky / Bags) 1978–1979). Věra Janoušková had already done something similar in Peřina/ Duvet (1966). However, while the origin of Janoušková’s work can only be derived from its name, Fibichová’s bags remained what they were to begin with. During the 1980s  she continued to develop the principles contained in her early works, and introduced into her ceramics an element of pressing, i.e. forcing the clay through a meat grinder, and wiring, which she used to wrap around the elementary stereo-metric shapes as in Poslední kostka / The Last Cube (1985).

PACHMANOVÁ M.: Zdena Fibichová (1933–1991), katalog výstavy, Museum Kampa, Praha 2013 PETROVÁ E.: Zdena Fibichová: Plastiky a kresby, katalog výstavy, Galerie Fronta, Praha 1990 ŠEVČÍKOVÁ J./ŠEVČÍK J.: Zdena Fibichová: Obydlí, katalog výstav, Výstavní síň semafor, Praha 1987 PETROVÁ E.: Zdena Fibichová: Sochařské práce z let 1966–1970, katalog výstavy, Pražákův palác, Brno 1970 PETROVÁ E.: Zdena Fibichová: Kresby, sochy, katalog výstavy, Městské muzeum a galerie, Hořice 1968 ŠETLÍK J.: Sochařské bilance 1955–1965, katalog výstavy, Dům umění, Olomouc 1965 VACHTOVÁ L.: Socha 1964, katalog výstavy, Oblastní galerie, Liberec 1964

Mezi snem a realitou - sochy z hlíny Zdeny Fibichové, Milan Hlaveš - Sklo, doba, lidé - vydání 23/2002

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