Pregnant pauses

Expectation, suspense and cycles of renewal are the sustained notes of an exhibition by the German artist Katharina Gun Oehlert at Museum Montanelli. At the entry to the show is her large installation Fermata, a triangular formation of ivory-toned plaster casts of women in the late stages of pregnancy suspended from the ceiling.

The expectant bellies and breasts, which the artist cast in plaster and gauze over a period of four years, are suspended over a triangle of downy white feathers on the floor, the triangular shape of the "nest" echoing the formation of the torsos and its downward orientation evoking an ancient symbol for the womb.

The musical fermata sign itself recalls a pregnant belly, and there is further symbolism in the number of body castings: 28, the average length of the menstrual cycle (which obviously is suspended during pregnancy). In music giving the direction to lengthen or sustain a note, the title expresses the unreal sense of time a woman may experience in late pregnancy, poised at the cusp of a monumental life change and a new beginning.

"Come, If You Love" is Oehlert's first exhibition in Prague. It is a concise survey of the 59-year-old artist's career, sampling more than two decades of her work and including some key pieces. The main themes in this show are timeless ones: life and death, beginnings and endings, longings and the female body in art. In addition to sculptural installations, the exhibition also includes a small selection of paintings and one tapestry triptych. Textiles appear in many of the sculptural works, and she also likes to incorporate metal wire and feathers.

Feathers, silk and wire are forged into a large wing in Icarus (1991). Here, the feathers are not a soft nest as in Fermata but the instrument of the mythical boy's downfall. Here, too, they are in the shape of a triangle, turned upward in a symbol of the male principle and aspiration. The single wing has crash-landed in a tangled wreckage in the corner of the room. The delicate wires binding the feathers and silk together trail off from the back of the wing to join in a dense skein, weighting down the wing and dooming Icarus' flight to freedom.

Other literary, mythological and musical allusions appear throughout the show, particularly in her paintings, which combine lyrical abstraction with fairy tale or dreamlike apparitions. She attaches literary references to some of the sculptures, such as whose title is a line by the 19th-century German poet Friedrich Rückert: I Live Alone in My Heaven.

The sculpture Come, If You Love, from which the show takes its title, is a large tangle of delicate wire installed in one of gallery's numerous nooks - which are used to good effect here as the gallery also has done in past exhibitions. The somewhat anthropomorphic wire ellipsoid casts a shadow on the wall above it like the energetic scribble drawing of a child.

One of the show's strongest pieces is Frozen Childhood, a room-size installation that looks like a classroom, with four rows of three chairs each and nine of them occupied by seated "figures" made from diaphanous dark fabric with a vertical red slit down the middle, each topped by a loose open circle of coiled wire. This installation also contains numeric symbolism, relating to pregnancy and the yearly cycle of renewal.

Near Frozen Childhood are some lines by the Zen Buddhist monk and poet Ryokan (1758-1831) that could equally allude to Icarus: "You must go yonder / beyond the dark clouds / that cover the mountain peak. / How else will you ever / glimpse the radiant clarity?"

In another small room, Oehlert has installed a second group of pregnant torsos, these ones in shades of brown, ivory and red. The figures, hanging from thin wires, are arranged in a conversational group and all seem to be patiently waiting together.

Oehlert's configurations of headless women are reminiscent of the groups of headless figures by the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz; however, though the Polish sculptor views her forms as "visualization of fears," Oehlert's are manifestations of hope. There are also similarities with the sculptures cast from women's bodies by American artist Kiki Smith. Both artists contravene the centuries-old tradition of idealizing the female form while creating earthly presences that are universal and timeless, yet each one the intimate imprint of an individual woman.

The show deals with the perception of time and how it can slow down with expectation. The upward-sloping surge of pregnant torsos in Fermata sets the tone at the beginning of the exhibition, and it is sustained throughout the show. Since MuMo has recently reorganized its exhibition space so that visitors circle back to the entrance as they leave, Fermata establishes the exhibition's key and also provides its coda.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com