Art for Good New Life for Exhibitions Elsi Spitmann Kyncl

Elsi Spitmann Kyncl

Galerie Ztichlá klika
25 July 2013 - 20 October 2013
curator Jan Placák

Since the beginning of the 1950s, the work of Elsi Spitmann has been replete with fresh colourfulness. Elsi composes monochrome planes side by side and thus creates compositionally inventive pieces in which she intensifies, accentuates, or, on the contrary, supresses the landscape, background, coastal pier, flowers, or houses among trees. Over time, concrete forms gradually vanish from her pictures. Elsi tries to capture the concrete, painted object as a feeling, which one can approach only when the object’s original purpose is forgotten. When we try to penetrate the mystery of the object we are examining visually, led only by feeling, do we try to paint it. Composed in various ways, but at the same time carefully elaborated compositionally, various angular, rounded, oval, but also very deformed and distorted forms, at times interpenetrate each other, while elsewhere harmoniously and contentedly coexisting side by side. In the seventies her ink drawings settle down into optically undulating, simple contours of bodies, which blend into one another and in places merge with the sinuous design.
Jan Placák

JAN PLACÁK (born 30 Oct 1958, five minutes after seven o’clock in the evening). In 1965 he became the Champion of Prague 6 in Olympic gymnastics in the floor exercise. In 1972 he won a tennis tournament in Prague and received the award from the tennis player Jan Kodeš. Since then, nothing significant has occurred in his life. For several years now he has been exhibiting his work one day a year at a group exhibition he organizes in his garden in the Jizera Mountains.

Exhibition plan

Audio

Rozhovor s E.S., Janem Placákem a Petrem Svobodou, Čro Vltava, srpen 2013

Files

Rozhovor s E.S., Janem Placákem a Petrem Svobodou, Čro Vltava, srpen 2013 - audio se otevře v novém okně - zároveň s poslechem můžete procházet web

Elsi Spitmann Kyncl

16. 5. 1930

Elsi Kyncl, neé Spitmann, was born 16 May 1930 in Essen. Her father was an architect and contractor who owned a large design agency. Upon the wishes of her father, she left high school before graduating and started working in his office as a draughtswoman. At the same time, she began taking private drawing lessons. At work she met the artist Ferdinand Spindler who moved in the circle of the avant-garde group Zero in Gelsenkirchen. F. Spindler provided her further artistic training, and she later became his wife. From 1957 they lived together in Gelsenkirchen, later in the artists’ colony Halfmannshof located near the city. Here Elsi helped organized exhibitions and in 1968 participated with her husband in Art-chema in Pardubice, where she met František Kyncl, who later became her second husband.

From the beginning of the 1970s she lived with František Kyncl in Düsseldorf. During this time she practically ceased her artistic activity and devoted her talent to her husband, the painter František Kyncl. She began working in one of the most important private German galleries, Gallery Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf. She has not ceased working entirely, however. Gradually she is transforming the plot of land near the house, in which she lived with her husband and in which she still lives, into her largest work yet. Bit by bit, she has transformed the plot into a spectacular garden in which everything comes across as natural. Flowers, trees, bushes, a small lake with fish, small artworks, a number of bird feeders and birdhouses fashioned by hand. The imposing work, which requires at least a little of Elsi’s time each day. Her reward is the natural beauty and song of several dozens of the most varied birds that have found a home in the garden.
Jan Placák