Adela Matasova

Adela Matasova lives and works in Prague in the Czech Republic. Matasova creates sculptures and site-specific installations. She was awarded a UNESCO grant for a two-month stay in Paris in 1968.

Her paper reliefs were awarded a prize at the Biennial of Drawing in Rijeka, Croatia, in 1982. Her work was exhibited at Art Basel 17 in 1987; at the CIAE in Chicago and at the Czech Art Festival in New York in 1994. Her works are represented at the National Gallery in Prague and other museums in the Czech Republic and abroad, as well as in private collections in Germany, USA, Sweden, and Poland. In 2000 she was a visiting professor at the Department of Art at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was during her repeated visits to the USA that Matasova became captivated by the majestic presence of the Western landscape. She created a series, Fictitious Projects, of manipulated photographs of the Western landscape. The photographs are partial recordings of actual segments of this region’s topography. Nevertheless, they are “fictitious landscapes” and result from skillful use of computer manipulation and negative large-scale printing. In some media new shapes are introduced into existing scenery, which seem to integrate as if they had always been a part of this extraterrestrial environment. The landscape is kept intact and mirror-like rectangles placed at the high points of the earth’s formations are the only intervention.

From the series Fictitious Projects, manipulated computerized photography,
2000, 165 x 96 cm.