The first exhibition of Jana Želibská in Gandy gallery in Bratislava called "The Parts of the Entity" will begin on September 30 and will last until November 28. It will present photo documentation Actions (1960) of some of her performances in nature, printed works from 1960/70 and a installation from 1990s. The graphic art will be presented in extensive way since it is not very well known among the general public, considering those few exhibitions where it has been displayed. In her silkscreen prints and lithography Želibská deals with human body in such a way that she decomposes it in smaller anatomical fragments or she brings forward naked female body represented as a passive erotic object, which can be observed and seized by a visitor without obstacles.
Jana Želibská (1941, Olomouc), visual artist living and working in Bratislava, play a key role on Slovak artistic scene from the end of the Sixties. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and she started her artistic and exhibition career in 1967 with the exhibition Možnosť odkrývania (Possibility of uncovering) at Gallery of Cyprián Majerník in Bratislava. During the following year she spent several months in a residency program in Paris, but she returned back to already occupied Czechoslovakia. Despite this fact, her exhibition activity was and still continues to be very rich. Her work was exhibited in many Slovak and international institutions: Zachęta – Narodowa Galeria Sztuky (Warsaw), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Gosudarstvennyj centre sovremennovo iskusstva (Moscow), Space Apollonia (Strasbourg), Galleria Valentina Moncada (Rome), Muzeul Na?ional de Arta˘ Contemporana˘ (Bucharest), Centre tchèque (Paris), Embassy of the Slovak Republic (Washington D. C.), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Wörlen (Passau), Národní galerie v Praze (Prague), XLVIII. Biennale di Venezia, Czechoslovak pavilion, Giardini di Castello (Venice), Courtyard Gallery (New York), Musée d´Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (Paris), Museo Universitario (Mexico) and others.

In her work, Jana Želibská is focusing on one specific area of topics executed in different types of artistic techniques. She mostly questions the situation of a woman in the society, the dominance of men, not only in the art world, but as well as around in different relationships between a man and a woman. She uses a human body - mainly woman´s one and its symbols represented by its fragments as breasts or rhombus of female genitals. Despite all these rather serious themes, Želibská never misses a certain sense of humour or irony . It is maybe why she never considered herself as a feminist artist who wanted to change the whole society, but rather as someone who pointed out a current condition.

Jana Želibská created traditional painting and prints as well as pop-art objects and environments. Later, during the “normalisation” period in the seventies in Czechoslovakia, Zelibská focused on more subtle expression such as performances in the nature, happenings and conceptual art. The most recent works include mostly video and large installations.

Jana Želibská - CV

Jana Želibská - Portfolio