SEZNAM VYOBRAZENÍ

On the occasion of Jan Ambrůz’s solo exhibition at the Brno House of Arts (19 August to 30 October 2022), a monograph has been published presenting for the first time a comprehensive overview of the artist’s sculptural work, ranging from his early works made during his university studies in the first half of the 1980s to his contemporary work, in which, in addition to his sculptural projects, Ambrůz’s activist- and environmentally-oriented interest in cultivating nature and the landscape in his native village of Šarovy has come to the fore. Ambrůz’s works represent, in all creative stages, an authentic and extremely interesting contribution to the nature of a sculptural work and contemporary art on the borderline between sculpture, object, installation, intervention, and architecture, especially in relation to space and nature. Sculptural works are always based on technological processes and properties of the material that predetermine the final form of the works. The principles of geometry have been applied, especially in the compositional assemblages and structures – temporary installations that can be assembled and disassembled – but also in the use of basic volumes of stereometric bodies. The laconic and reduced morphology of the sculptures and installations, for which the artist always chooses simple, matter-of-fact names referring to the form or the initial theme (e.g. Trough, Cradle, etc.), also contains an unspoken – but latently present – transcendent dimension that goes beyond the physical determinateness of the works. Although the works are often of monumental proportions, their scale and form always reflect in some way the physical scale of a human. Ironwork, glasswork or stonework are often involved in the production of the works of art, yet it is still important for the artist to be able to largely create or participate in the creation of his works and to manipulate them himself. The bulk of Ambrůz’s work was created in seclusion, away from art centres, as a result of the solitary nature of the artist, who has reflected some of the inclinations of art since the 1960s in his work. These features include, above all, American Minimalism, the works by Carl Andre and Richard Serra (with whom Ambrůz is primarily associated by his use of a monumental scale for outdoor sculptures), the laconic abstract morphology of the sculptures without literary or content connotations, and the emphasis on the horizontality of the sculptures. Unlike the American artists whose works can be simplistically described as featureless, Ambrůz emphasizes the specific nature of the materials used and their ambivalence. The affinity can therefore be seen in the context of post-war constructivist tendencies and the Czech New Sensibility of the 1960s, with which Ambrůz shares an interest in basic geometric morphology, which is then connected with the artist’s style and his emphasis on the specific properties of the material, thus polarizing the default pure rationality. A witness is elements of the lability, fragility and luminosity of monumental installations, the craftsmanship in processing wooden beams, the weight of small metal objects and their corrosion, the use of the coloured surfaces of stone blocks and other material, and object paradoxes. Other impulses include conceptual tendencies, land art, and earthworks in both the international and Czech context of the 1970s, but also the starting points of postmodern art. For Ambrůz, all these inclinations have been a form of dialogue, a creative process in which he arrived at his own distinctive solution, based on his own approach to the material and his personal connection and sensitivity to space and landscape. It was indeed the landscape — for Ambrůz initially representing work with open space and scale which his pieces interacted with specifically — which over time gained importance for the environmental activities and activism that eventually became part of the Another Landscape project in Šarovy near Zlín which Ambůz has been focusing on since 2007. At the time, Ambrůz’s project was unique in the Czech environment in its approach to the care and reclamation of a specific agriculturally-shaped landscape. This book is arranged more or less chronologically in chapters. It also includes two older texts and two recent interviews with the author. The interview at the beginning, We All Are a Bit of a Designer, shows lesser-known background from the period of Ambrůz’s studies at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Uherské Hradiště and later at the design studio of the Zlín section of the Praguebased Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. His path to free creative work meant a certain reaction to the school environment and the utilitarian character of design, which on the other hand influenced Ambrůz’s work and gave him freedom in his approach to work and materials. Contemporary texts by Yvonna Boháčová and Jiří Valoch convey an important and personal experience of the artist’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. The text for the catalogue of the exhibition in Olomouc A Trip to Lipník or the Genius Loci of the Skins Drying Plants by Yvonna Boháčová, who followed Ambrůz’s work from its beginnings and regularly focused on it, was written in 1987 on the basis of her direct experience of the installation of glass panes in the former skins-and-hides drying plant in Lipník nad Bečvou.

It provides unique information from a non-transferable experience, a temporary installation for which the light and spatial conditions of the site and physical personal presence were important. Jiří Valoch’s text Paintings/Documentation/Sculptures for a 1989 exhibition at the Youth Gallery in Brno, aptly delineates the important qualities of Ambrůz’s early works, from the land art projects in the landscape to his glass installations and first wooden sculptures. Jiří Valoch has long been systematically focused on Ambrůz’s work and has supported the artist’s work in both the Czech and international context; they have been linked by a long-standing friendship. The following texts, Kaliopi Chamonikola’s The Glass Geometry of Jan Ambrůz and Marika Svobodová’s Wood, Metal and Stone in Ambrůz’s Work of the 1990s, deal with Ambrůz’s work chronologically, from his first original figurative sculptures as part of his university studies before the mid-1980s forward to the end of the 1990s. These chapters focus on working with the materials Ambrůz used at a particular period, namely glass, wood, metal and stone, whose specific nature predetermined the way he worked. The temporal sequence in the choice of specific materials was related to, among other things, the availability or opportunity to use them. Thus, although the works made from each material are arranged in separate chapters, the continuity and interconnection of the works and installations made from different materials is also important. The knowledge and techniques that Ambrůz mastered, for example when working with wooden beams, were subsequently transferred to his new horizontal glass installations. The geometry of the hanging installations predetermined the form of the large-scale black drawings and other work. Ambrůz kept returning to all the materials he used, most of all to glass, during the new millennium with his anotherlandscape project, but also in new sculptural realisations. The latest works are presented in the book with a reference to an exhibition prepared for the Brno House of Arts in 2022. For this show, Jan Ambrůz has created horizontal objects and installations made of various materials, including sculptures entitled Curves made of cast glass, i.e., a technology that appears in his work for the first time. Alongside the objects, the connecting motif of an oval is developed in large-scale black drawings, in which the artist returns to the technique used since the mid-1980s of drawing with graphite on canvas. The short videos in the exhibition create a communication with the exhibited objects, a common narrative with them; at the same time, their use in the exhibition is a reminder of the importance and interconnection between Ambrůz’s work and nature. A separate chapter of the book, Lenka Dolanová’s text entitled Other Forms of Landscape, is devoted to Jan Ambrůz’s long-standing environmental and sculptural project. In this text, the author discusses in detail and chronologically the activities of the anotherlandscape association, which Jan Ambrůz founded in Šarovy in order to promote sculpting and later mainly environmental and activist activities reclaiming the agricultural land of Šarovy and striving for the return of local people to the landscape. Despite the problematic relationships and conflicts that the anotherlandscape project and its implementation provoked in the municipality and its leadership, it represents an important example of care for a specific place and landscape in the context of contemporary art, foreshadowing contemporary artistic initiatives. A follow-up interview with Ambrůz, Cultural Landscape is the Image of People, reveals his motivations and starting points while uncovering both the complications that accompanied the project as well as his vision for how to continue addressing the landscape. In addition to the public space in Šarovy, from the beginning Ambrůz also focused on the private personal space of his land and meadows where he gradually built sculptural utilitarian structures and integrated both his earlier and newer sculptural works into an organic harmony with the surrounding nature, meadows, ponds, and paths. This private landscape is recorded in the text Inhabited Space by Marika Svobodová. This book includes a brief biography of the artist as a record of the most important events in his life, a list of his solo and collective exhibitions which we have tried to compile as completely as possible, and a selected bibliography including solo and collective exhibition catalogues, publications, and reviews. The attachment also includes a list of the activities of the anotherlandscape association, updated to the time of publication.