Artist Alena Kučerová, whose works are on display all winter at the Heart is a Temple exhibition at Prague Castle, is renowned for her perforated metal matrices. Whether used for printing or exhibited as standalone pieces, these matrices result in unique works that blend the visual impact of dots and lines. Her themes often focus on scenes from everyday life, prominently featuring swimmers and horses. From horseback, the artist observes the serene landscape of the Polabí region, capturing its tranquil beauty in her art.
Alena Kučerová’s art is all about balance and a sense of calm. She works mainly with tin-plated steel, the kind usually used for cans but transforms it into something extraordinary. Using drypoint, she scratches the surface, punches holes of different sizes with cobbler’s awls, presses in wires, or crumples the metal to create fresh, unexpected textures.
The Heart is a Temple Exhibition Brings Swimmers to Life
The exhibition at the Imperial Stables of Prague Castle is filled with scenes of swimmers, bathers, and sauna-goers. Visitors can see Kučerová’s prints side by side with the original metal matrices, experiencing the unique character of each. The show also takes you through her evolving style—from minimalist, abstract experiments with lines and dots, to everyday figures set within carefully perforated grids, and her latest creations using wood and cardboard. Even now, her love for the dot remains, this time brought to life through hammered nails.
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At the Heart is a Temple exhibition, Alena Kučerová’s graphics interact with large-scale photographs by Ivan Pinkava and a variety of objects by young sculptor Kateřina Komm. The diverse works of three generations of artists are displayed side by side, with curator Petr Vaňous allowing their interplay to unfold for the viewer. This approach invites reflection on how visual art captures human experience, emotion, and memory.
Mastering Perforated Dots and Lines
Born in 1935, Alena Kučerová first studied at the Higher School of Interior Design before attending the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where she was a student of Professor Antonín Strnadel. Thanks to his support, she managed to graduate early in 1959, despite the political purges of the time. During her studies, she met her future husband, glass artist Vladimír Kopecký.
In 1961, Kučerová’s friend Adriena Šimotová introduced her to the UB 12 group, which included artists like Václav Bartovský, Václav Boštík, and Jiří John. However, after the onset of normalization in Czechoslovakia, the group was banned, and Kučerová was prohibited from exhibiting her work publicly.
At the start of her career, Alena Kučerová focused on drypoint graphics, exploring both realistic and abstract motifs. In the 1960s, she switched from copper plates to the more affordable tin-plated sheets used for making cans. This new material led her to experiment with perforation techniques, and in 1963, she incorporated perforated dots into her graphics for the first time. Over time, she developed various ways of working with these dots—combining them with drypoint etching, connecting them into lines, or arranging them into geometric grids.
Since the Mid-1960s, Kučerová Has Exhibited Both Prints and Matrices
Using this technique, Kučerová created a series of perforated figurative works depicting people in ordinary, often mundane situations, including scenes of swimming or sauna bathing. Other prints explored themes of the sea, the movement of waves, and memories of visits to Black Sea beaches.
The exhibition features a broad selection of her prints, showcasing swimmers, ocean waves, and figures in saunas or bathrooms. In her 1967 work At the Bath, the tiled walls are represented by dense rows of dots forming straight lines, while the smooth contours of a human body are defined by a single continuous line, creating a striking contrast.
A few years later, Alena Kučerová began showcasing her printing matrices as independent works of art alongside her graphics. Some of these matrices were later mounted in expressive, custom-made frames. Her perforated sheets—sometimes framed against a light background to emphasize their shadows, other times left unframed on the wall—are a striking highlight of the Heart is a Temple exhibition.
In the late 1960s, Kučerová also experimented with bold, intensely colored prints. She even colored the plates themselves, as demonstrated by the vividly hued metal matrix Rest from the late 1960s, which is featured in the exhibition.
Kučerová revisited these themes and techniques throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Later, her focus shifted towards landscapes and nature, particularly the central Bohemian Polabí region, which was the landscape of her childhood. From horseback, she often viewed and depicted the elegant animals of this region, including horses.
The Final Phase of Kučerová's Work: A Shift Away from Printmaking
From the early 1990s, Kučerová’s work underwent a significant transformation, shifting focus to detail and once again gravitating towards abstraction. She also returned to the work of German poet Christian Morgenstern, whose poetry she had first illustrated as an art student. After losing her Prague studio and printing press in 1996, Kučerová decided to leave printmaking behind. However, her passion for art remained strong. After relocating to the countryside, she began creating wooden reliefs and assemblages made from wood, twigs, and other natural materials. Even in these new works, she returned to her use of points—this time through nails or perforated cardboard.
The exhibition at the Císařská konírna will be open until March 16, 2025.
