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‘Mutation is everywhere. We live in a sci-fi world now,’ says the Czech artist Anna Hulačová. The sci-fi reference sounds odd coming from a thirtysomething artist who lives and works in a Czech village and whose father is a carpenter and farmer. Then again, there’s nothing odd about it. Hulačová and her figurative sculptures explore the web of tensions between local and global, utopia and dystopia, organic and digital, evolution and mutation.
In the dead of winter, I meet Hulačová at hunt kastner gallery in central Prague. She’s made the trip from the countryside to see me. Most of the larger pieces in her studio are already on their way to Art Basel Hong Kong via Berlin, so better to see a range of work – busts and masks in concrete, a meaty hand carved from wood, a delicate insect of salmon-hued silicone – in gallery storage (as well as, to my delight, on view in an expansive group exhibition called ‘Éntomos’ at the Prague City Gallery, alongside pieces by Hungarian sculptor Zsófia Kerestes and Czech Surrealist František Janoušek). As we speak and view work that the artist has produced since graduating from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2012, her personality unfolds: She’s both humble and hungrily curious, softly spoken but also adamant about the issues dear to her. Born in 1984, Hulačová experienced the last years of communism prior to the Czech Republic’s Velvet Revolution in 1989. Her work incorporates traditional or even folkloric techniques as it subtly critiques late capitalism and the technology driving it – from what one could call a post-communist perspective.
‘I like combinations and contrasts,’ explains the artist. Although her sculptures are usually monochromatic in gray, white, or natural linden wood, they are laden with references that span eras, movements, materials, and topics both hot-button and eternal; they are like three-dimensional collages through space, time, and art history. They also explore figuration, which especially during her studies in the 2000s, ran counter to almost-expected sculptural abstraction. ‘I’m interested in working with a representative of what existed in the past, what defined ideology and social ideals in sculpture,’ the artist said in a 2016 Czech film profile, ‘and to compare them to the present.’
Some older works refer to Greek antiquity, others to beastly creatures from Central European folklore. Newer sculptures take inspiration from Surrealism, Futurism, and the century-old public sculptures of the Czech artist Otto Gutfreund – his work, often depicting people celebrating progress, is still visible on Prague’s facades. Many connect to current issues: In Cosmonauts (2018), two helmeted beekeepers in intricately decorated cement relief remind us of today’s insect apocalypse, but with triumphant upstretched arms they also evoke Soviet-era space travelers. Smaller floor sculptures in concrete with flat surfaces bearing graphite drawings, such as InSections; Wasp Madonna (2018), combine the animal and vegetal.
Her complex installations go further to illustrate modern life’s social tensions: On view last year at both the Baltic Triennial and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Underworld Upside Down (2018) sees stylized figures bearing home appliances. Near them, a mysterious snakelike form loops toward a Dionysus figure with bubbles gurgling from its belly as it reclines atop an upturned swimming pool. It’s a comment on our insatiable wants and the ‘digestive tract’ of capitalism. Another installation, showing the eerie (and surrealist) atomization of the nuclear family – the artist has a daughter, now almost 4 years old, with her partner, also a sculptor – with multiple figures in a sterile kitchen, was recently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
This is heady stuff, but underlying the conceptual level is Hulačová’s deep love of materiality. ‘My father was a carpenter and restorer of furniture,’ she explains. Before she began art school in 2006 – an interesting decision for a rural student with few artworld connections at the time – she trained as a carpenter as well. ‘Wood was my first material.’ But her current favored medium is concrete, which came later, and has stuck. She plays with its texture, surface, and shape, carving into it, drawing upon it, leaving it rough or sanding it smooth. ‘I like its grayness, its dryness. It’s a common material,’ she says. ‘I use concrete as a base and other materials on top – they always feel so wet and juicy in contrast. If you take the moisture away from concrete, you are left with sand and dust.
More than once in our conversation, Hulačová mentions spirituality and mysticism. Recurring symbols such as hands or bees – including real honeycombs and hives incorporated into sculptures – transcend mere representation. Hands are about labor, and also philosophically connect to the eternal, while the ancient Greeks saw bees as a symbol of immortality and fertility, but also the underworld. Interestingly, in the artist’s human figures, hands (and faces) are often absent or eerily modified.
Hulačová tells me that, at the moment, she is particularly concerned with the Czech history of agricultural collectivism, in which small farms were forced to consolidate during communist industrialization in the 1950s, and the 75% drop in insect species in Central Europe since (newer sculptures are the insects rendered in salmon-hued silicone). ‘What Anna doesn’t talk about much is that she’s an activist,’ the gallerist Kacha Kastner adds – hunt kastner began working with the artist after her 2013 show at the Prague gallery 35m2. Hulačová is working against the use of glyphosate in Czech farming; a germinating idea is to create a large Land Art-style work in local fields. ‘It’s very important how landscape changes,’ says the artist. ‘I like exploring how mutation continues. It starts in a small organism and it’s coming to us, in our bodies.’
These themes and her hypnotic forms have certainly hit a nerve. Due to an increasingly busy exhibition schedule and burgeoning career, Hulačová recently made the difficult decision to give up her position as assistant sculpture professor at her alma mater. At Art Basel Hong Kong, she will show a selection of mutant concrete sculptures along with objects such as a wooden skateboard in ornate intarsia. The wood came from her father’s archive; he fabricated the piece to Hulačová’s design (‘My dad wanted me to help him after my studies, but now it looks like he’s helping me!’ she jokes). Pieces like tables and pedestals are creeping into her production; they support the sculptures but are also artworks in their own right. The work digs deeps into the artist’s own histories but also brilliantly captures universal high and low cultures far beyond.
For me, one question still hangs in the air: Is Hulačová a pessimist or an optimist? She chuckles. ‘It depends on the day,’ she says, a grin slowly appearing across her face. ‘Sometimes I feel very apocalyptic but…I think it’s optimistic to be apocalyptic.’ More contrast and contradiction, but there is indeed a poetry in predicting devastation as well as paradise. ‘We need utopian visions to survive, but we need to be critical as well.’
Discover more artists and galleries participating in the Discoveries sector at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 here.
Top image: Anna Hulačová, photographed by Michaela Čejková for Art Basel.