#danielavinopalová

[andreahamiltonblog]

Daniela Vinopalová

Daniela Vinopalová was born in Opava, Czechoslovakia, in 1928 and died in Prague in 2017. She grew up and experienced the turbulence of the 20th-cerntury, living through the German occupation 1939-1945, followed by the republic’s assimilation into the Eastern Bloc from 1948 to 1989. She witnessed the period of liberalization in 1968, known as the Prague Spring, which violently ended when the troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Communist rule came to an end with the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the re-establishment of a democratic parliamentary republic. Vinopalová therefore lived and created her work in conditions in which it was difficult to be an artist and in which life itself was difficult.

Despite this or perhaps because of it, Vinopalová created extraordinary abstract sculptures, in a variety of media, in her Prague apartment-studio, which expressed her spiritual and emotional engagement with the world around her. The birth of something that she could genuinely regard as her own sculptural idiom occurred in the early 1960s as soon as she began to mark out space through the medium of clay, a material so symbolic of human civilisation. Vinopalová tried to discover forms that would emerge from deep within herself. This challenging pursuit gave rise to the original ‘sculpture-vase’.  These non-figurative sculptures resemble a vase but are based on a figure and have no connection with decorative vases.

Her legacy continues with the efforts of the artist’s family and the London based artist estate advisory Stephenson art. 

Image 1: Daniela Vinopalová, Spatial Study II, 1959-1960

Image 2: Daniela Vinopalová, Sculpture vase

Image 3: Daniela Vinopalová in her studio. Photograph by Miroslav Hak