The Cabinet of Curiosities section of the exhibition How to Collect Art: The Karel Tutsch Story introduces visitors to Karel Tutsch’s early collecting activities through a set of ex libris – a collection of small-scale applied graphic art. From here, Tutsch’s interests logically expanded to include fine art prints. Over time, the Cabinet of Curiosities will present various artists and their works on paper that form an indispensable part of the collection.
Alena Kučerová (b. 1935) is a printmaker and creator of art objects made by recycling her own metal matrices, which she painted with synthetic colours and framed in found boards or branches. After graduating from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (1954–1959), she emerged onto the art scene in the company of many friends. She later was the youngest, yet highly successful member of the important UB 12 art group, which promoted the idea of a new and sensitive approach to what we see. In her works, Kučerová developed the possibilities of the era’s material printing technique into a distinctive method involving perforation. Though her approach was initially born of necessity, the aesthetic qualities of the open space of the printing plate and the process itself, which recalled traditional handcrafted work, so captivated her that she began to develop and refine this technique further. Under the influence of the emerging new figuration, her early studies of form, grids and regular structures evolved into simple silhouettes of figures and landscapes.
Unlike many other artists of her generation, Kučerová has never sought to depict the pain of the world; despite all the difficulties of life, she still feels that one can always find solace from the noise and pressures of an overly politicized society. Only on very rare occasions does she react to the outside world, as in Minerve (1968). Instead, she tends to capture what she calls “personal good moments”, times when she quiets her rational mind and opens up to the physical experience of the present, which gives her the chance to discover answers to questions such as “What things are worth the effort? What is most necessary? (…) The problem is to find the moment to contemplate such questions.” (Catalogue to the exhibition of the group UB 12, House of Arts Brno, 1965.)
Even her seemingly purely abstract prints are “energetic” portraits of the moment of their birth, of the place, moment or event from which she drew inspiration. Through poetic titles, she lends the viewer a helping hand. If we open ourselves to this feeling, her prints allow us to see walls, puddles, clouds or even a Tuesday differently and to experience even the most banal moment as a festive one.
The Karel Tutsch Collection is in the possession of 44 prints by this artist, a significant number of them abstract works from the mid-1960s. Kučerová’s later period is represented in the collection by just four prints from 1981 and 1983. Tutsch acquired some of the works through their shared acquaintance, the photographer Jindřich Štreit, and personally purchased the others during a later visit to Kučerová’s printmaking workshop on Prague’s Řásnovka Street.
