Emila MEDKOVÁ.

Lot 207
Go to lot
Estimation :
2000 - 3000 EUR
Result without fees
Result : 8 000EUR
Emila MEDKOVÁ.
Cascade of hair. 1949. Original photograph, silver print, signed, dated and titled on the back (38 x 29 cm). Emblematic image of the early life of Emila Medková (1928-1985). Emila Medková (1928-1985) was a Prague photographer and a central figure in the post-war Czech surrealist group. She was trained by Josef Ehm at the Prague School of Fine Arts. Directly inspired by Toyen's Myth of Light (1946), "Cascade of Hair, like many of Medková's Shadowplay cycle of photographs from the late 1940s, rehearses uncomfortable apparitions, the migration of meanings between objects (egg/ eye, water/hair), and the rudderless drift between the natural and human worlds familiar from much surrealist painting of the 1930s. [...] The work of Emila Medková represents one of the most sustained and critically engaged examples of surrealist documentary photography, although it has been seen only rarely outside of the Czech Republic in either exhibition or reproduction [...]. Born in 1928 and active from the late 1940s until a few years before her death in 1985, this invisibility echoes the phantom existence of the post-war Czech surrealist group of which she was a central member, a fascinating and dynamic intellectual circle which over the period in question enjoyed no more than a few years of public existence, the remaining three decades being spent underground" (Krzysztof Fija?kowski, Emila Medková: The Magic of Despair, in Tate Papers, no. 4, Autumn 2005, online: www.tate.org.uk).
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue