MAGDALENA JETELOVÁ: Munich

For more than 50 years, Magdalena Jetelová has challenged her audience with her boundary-pushing work on the relationship between visuality and physical space. Her numerous institutional exhibitions have featured light installations, projections, sound, mirrors, interaction with the audience, and monumental interventions in space.

Jetelová transforms the gallery into a visual space that invites contemplation and reflection. In the center of the space are two of her iconic wooden sculptures from the 1980s, Houses, from which smoke billows. Light boxes from her Pacific Ring of Fire Project and new works from her current series of pyrotechnic drawings demonstrate her multidisciplinary practice.

The focus of her photo series Pacific Ring of Fire is not only the fragility of Patagonia‘s unique landscape. In her large format black-and-white photographs, Jetelová shows us the boundaries of the diverging tectonic plates along the line of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the constantly moving volcanic belt in the Pacific Ocean. Her tool is the laser beam, which she uses to literally cut through nature. She often uses long exposures, which require her to travel to the most inaccessible places, such as a swaying boat or a fragile ice landscape. The camera captures the light and her texts are written into the landscape, creating impressive and sublime images that exude a magical aura.

Jetelová first used this type of light installation in her Island Project in 1992. Here too, she used recordings of laser beams that she placed in nature to create light interventions in the archaic landscape of Iceland. The laser beam traces the underwater mountain range, the course of the continental watershed, which also marks the geological boundary between America and Europe.

During her studies in Italy, Jetelová was inspired by movements such as Arte Povera and contemporaries such as Richard Deacon of New British Sculpture and James Coleman. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. Her work is represented in numerous public collections and has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions internationally, including at the National Gallery in Prague, Tate London, Riverside Studios London, MoMA New York, the Sydney Biennale, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and Documenta 8 in Kassel.