Adéla Součková has a long history of working across multiple media – painting, drawings, text, and video and performance art. Her works reveal her deep interest in ancient cultures and their grand narratives, and also in how to create an epic that might reflect the era in which we live. Through her art, she engages in a dialogue with artisanal and verbal traditions that are closely related to personal experiences in nature and our movement through the landscape that enables us to experience freedom while being aware of a historical connection with a particular place. Součková’s artworks and the stories associated with them tell us much about the role of spirituality. They also explore the possibility of transforming disappearing traditions and finding or rediscovering their place and purpose in today’s world of digital technologies.

Adéla Součková has been working with the technique of blue fabric printing for several years already. Collaborating with a workshop in Strážnice, she regularly revisits a number of different themes such as myths, the relationship to one’s ancestors, the cyclical recurrence of events, birth and fertility, and of course death. Her projects have been well received both at home and abroad; in 2018 she was nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, whose international jury included her among the five finalists with her multimedia installation. Besides her large figural blue fabric prints, Součková has also been working on a series of Fountains exploring ancient aspects of our relationship to water and its various forms on the boundary between the living and non-living world. Water is presented as a basic element associated with energy, as a cleansing and life-giving element associated with magic and rituals. It is personified as a living being associated with symbolic fertility, as a literal and figurative source or spring, and as a metaphor of life.

Součková was loosely inspired to make her blue fabric paintings, most of which were created last year, by the medieval gravestones that she saw more than ten years ago while travelling in Armenia. Her textile stelae recall a historical compositional arrangement with a figure (usually life-sized) at its centre. She plays with positive and negative iterations of this figure, treating it as a changeable sign and the vehicle of a story that helps her to narrate impersonal attributes of banality such as an emergency button, a needle, a knife, keys and a safety razor. Her deep indigo blue seems imbued with the echoes of end-of-life rituals, a fact that takes on unexpectedly topical relevance today.

Adéla Součková is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Painting Studio II/School of Vladimír Skrepl, before then the Drawing Studio of Jitka Svobodová). She also completed studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden (Ulrike Grossarth). She was a finalist in the Critics’ Award for Young Artists in 2014 and 2015, and was a Jindřich Chalupecký Award finalist in 2018. She attended residencies at Art in General in New York and Sesama in Indonesia in 2017, followed by Awagami (Japan) and the Silk Museum (Georgia) in 2019. She has published two artist’s books.

Součková regularly exhibits her work, mainly at independent galleries in Germany and the Czech Republic, including group exhibitions at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga), Bozar (Brussels), Guardini Stiftung (Berlin), and the Brno House of Arts, and solo exhibitions at Label201 (Rome), Zwitschermaschine and Tschechisches Zentrum (Berlin), and MWW Muzeum Współczesne (Wroclaw).