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The body beautiful

From the art schools, new and classic approaches to the human form
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
November 21st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Mizu Yamamoto's work is among the most conventional in the show.
Figurama 2007

at Police Museum of the Czech Republic Ends Dec. 31. Ke Karlovu 1, Prague 2–New Town. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

“Figurama” is a traveling exhibition of nude studies made by professors and their students at a number of universities in the region, including the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) and the Institute of Art and Design of the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň.
The first Figurama show was organized in 2001 by artist Karel Pokorný, a former lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Technology (VUT) in Brno, and Boris Jirků, a professor and former rector of AVU. Since its inaugural showing in Znojmo with works by VUT and UMPRUM students, the exhibition has grown to include 11 schools representing seven countries, including Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, the United States and Japan.
At the entrance to this year’s show, Dušan Homoliak’s realistic-looking papier-maché Babička, or Grandmother, is strategically placed like a stern gallery watcher in a floral dress. From that point on, the human figure appears in all shapes and in all media, including drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs.
Many of the works are traditional nudes, studio drawings of live models ranging from young to old, firm-bodied to flabby or even obese. Some students get more imaginative with this genre, such as Eva Hronovská with a cyberpunk variation — a drawing of a woman whose body is half-aged, half-colored (in red), and seemingly only half-human. Similarly, Petr Oriešek’s large, black body-cast sculpture is a person turned inside out, with vital organs and other major parts visible on the surface.
In a nearby room, the contributions from the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, provide the most modern variations, with new-media art such as animation frames, documented performances (on posters) and experimental color photography, in which drawing was done with laser pointers and painted effects were created by opening the camera shutter in the dark.
From this group, however, the simpler works on paper stand out, such as Florian Ruhig’s watercolor painting The Angry Red Woman; a Dadaist-punk collage by André Gruger; and Sebastian Haslauer’s Pinselrythmus. Haslauer’s work in particular is among the most colorfully abstract figures in the show, and one of the most memorable.
In an adjoining room, Naoaki Yamamoto’s untitled painting compels the viewer to wonder: Where is the figure? It is everywhere and nowhere on his small, elongated canvas of gray with smears of purple, black and white at its focal point.
In the same room, Markéta Urbanová dominates the space with two realistic paintings of nude women who appear to be covered in white powder, wrestling and playing like children. In a nearby corner room, Jan Šebánek’s wax figures of the beloved Czech puppet characters Špejbl and Hurvínek in their full and proper clothing seem like prudish invaders. Another curiosity is Natalie Chalcarzová’s lime-green mummy figure with red wax drops covering its body, which looks like a human cactus sweating blood.
In the main room, dominating one long wall and half of another, is a different view of the human form altogether as seen in the works of three young Japanese women, all former students of Naoki Yamamoto at Wako University in Tokyo.
Masako Yoshitake has the largest work in the show: a mammoth black mass on construction paper with a mesh-like torso that is seemingly without limbs and faceless, as its head is a white mess dripping to the bottom of the paper. At the other end, Yoshitake’s figure in purple and red is a mass of limbs, and Konomi Hanai’s flurry of lines coalescing into elongated circles is like a body in motion, rapidly exercising or fast-forwarding toward a collapse.
Of the Japanese artists, only the works of Mizu Yamamoto (no relation to her professor) reveal a suavely recognizable approach to the human form as Europeans expect to see it. Of the 10 works from Japan, most are like visual forces of nature, in sharp contrast to most of the charcoal drawings by students elsewhere in the show.
In the other stops on its tour, Figurama is located in more traditional gallery spaces. But, wherever it shows, the exhibition’s strength is in illustrating how artists across generations and different nations see and interpret the human figure. Many are employing new media, while others are still employing traditional approaches.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (21/11/2007):

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