Klára Bočkayová — From the cycle Angel’s paintings I.

Klára Bočkayová entered the art scene in the early 1970s as an author with a strong interest in the medium of painting and drawing. Since 1974 she has begun to work with banal models borrowing from rural and urban households of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century (tablecloths, rugs, embroidery). She uses typically female craftwork as a starting point for the frottage, which is an ironic reflexion of the female position in the society, underlined by the titles of some artworks: ´Why do I need a young wife´ (1987), ´Marry me off mum´ (1987), ´Lunch is ready´ (1990).

The graphic art technique called frottage invented by Max Ernst in the 1920s is applied by Klára Bočkayová on paper, canvas or gently woven white cloth and on the ground of her own experiments is transformed into author´s technique, so called phased frottage, used for the first time in the graphite A4 drawings cycle in 1986. A term first applied by Czech poet Ludvík Kundera accurately describes the shift, which was made by the author, when she activated statically applied themes while handling the paper itself or canvas. Her artwork is characterized by the dynamic image surface that is created by multiplying overlapping anamorphous shapes of a selected detail or the entire theme of the usurped/seized model artwork.

The painting ´Angelic images´ belongs to a series of canvasses with author´s typical style originated by overprinting the embroidery of an angel through frottage. Painting, dominated by the layering and overlapping of the cherubic motifs is specific for its structure, formed while using two types of material – oil stick and acrylic painting. Character on Angel as the main iconographic theme appears in her other works, e.g. in a later cycle ´Autumn angels (I-IX)´ from 1991, or in the individual acrylic paintings with an identical name ´Great angelic painting´ (all from 1991).