Get Creative with Ivana Šrámková

A talk with the painter, sculptor, and glass artist.

Ivana Šrámková (*1960) is an artist deeply connected to our region. She was born in Liberec, grew up in Turnov, traveled to Malá Skálu for private painting lessons in her childhood, completed her secondary education at the glass school in Železný Brod (1976–1980), and spent her summer holidays at a cottage in Frýdštejn. Over the years, she has found a sincere relationship with the local landscape, its natural beauty, the distinctive charm of timber-framed architecture, and the forgotten art of folk carpenters, stonemasons, and sculptors. Here, she also found – and continues to find – strong sources of inspiration for her artistic work.
Coming from the school of Stanislav Libenský, she focuses on cast sculpture. Her work can be divided into two basic sections: In small-scale sculpture, she explores themes primarily from the animal kingdom. In her large-format, technologically demanding objects, she records figurative forms, but abstracts their shapes and allows archetypal, monumental objects to emerge.

Since her youth, Ivana Šrámková has alternated between periods of glassmaking and periods of painting. Her painting work carries features of monumentality just as convincingly as the traces of an individual style and the living touch of the artist's hand. Intensely applied color in expressive figurative paintings recalls a logical connection to the painted glass of her early period. While paintings inspired by paper roses from a fairground shooting range are characterized by an economical expression without unnecessary details, they possess, in addition to undeniable artistic quality, a remarkable vital energy that brings hidden messages inviting reflection on a secondary level. Similarly, Ivana Šrámková's meditative pictorial compositions, in which the direct tie to perceived reality vanishes, provide the viewer with space for their own feelings.