Hana Purkrábková
Hana Purkrábková (19 August 1936, Tábor - 14 January 2019, Prague) was a Czech ceramist and sculptor. Biography. After finishing primary school in Tábor, she studied at the Secondary Industrial Ceramic School in Bechyně from 1951 to 1955. The school under the guidance of chemist Ing. Petrů had an excellent teaching staff at that time (the head of the art department was academic sculptor Prof. Bohumil Dobiáš) and was characterized by a liberal atmosphere. From there she was accepted to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague to the studio of professor Jan Kavan, where she met  Karel Pauzer. After graduating in 1961, she was employed in the ceramics workshop of the "Central Office of Arts and Crafts" in Štěchovice (formerly the David family's business), and until 1969 she also carried out her free work there. In 1962-1969 she took part in several exhibitions of young artists in Prague, the "International Ceramic Symposium" at the Václav Špála Gallery, an exhibition in Amsterdam and the important "New Figuration" exhibition at Mánes Gallery in Prague. From 1969 onwards, she worked only freely in the studio she and Karel Pauzer built together in Brunšov. After the Warsaw Pact  invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the following period of "normalization", she exhibited mostly ceramics and occasionally sculptures at joint exhibitions. Her first solo exhibition (together with V. Boudníková) took place in 1977 in Týn nad Vltavou, while a solo exhibition with Karel Pauzer took place in 1988, in Atrium Gallery in Prague. She participated in unofficial exhibitions in the 1980s and contributed to the anthology "Grey Brick" published by the Jazz Section in 1985. In 1986 she received a gold medal at the International Ceramics Exhibition in Gualdo Tadino, Italy. Since 1992 she has been a member of the renewed Umělecká  beseda arts association and of the Association of Ceramic Artists. She lived and worked in Brunšov. Work. She creates her works almost exclusively in ceramic and fire clay, keeping the colour of the material and the raw surface or finishing them with patina and fine polychromy. Her lifelong theme is the figure, the psychology of human expressions and situations. At the beginning, when she created chamber sculptures in parallel with utilitarian ceramics spun on the potter's wheel, she loosely followed the legacy of the previous generation of sculptors in terms of modelling, colour and civil matter-of-factness, but  in terms of expression, stylisation and conception she already co-created the aesthetics of the "New figuration". The artist does not depict faces, but human types; she is not interested in specific features, but in generalizing parables of human smallness, imperfection and minor vices. She catches people in banal or embarrassing situations, sometimes with sympathy and understanding (a group of seated ladies), sometimes with irony and exaggeration (eaters, sloths and dreamers). However, the author is completely merciless in her expressive or grotesque portrayal of various heads, loudmouths and observers, whose human smallness is evident despite their horrible gesticulation. Their counterparts  are the passive-looking half-figures of citizens or sleepers. The world of humans and animals, at the beginning of the work depicted in general situations and relationships ("Friendly Dog", "Master and Dog"), eventually merges and fuses into the chimera of an animal with a human face - an unkind symbol of the Candidate of our time.