Jan Jedlička

The monograph on Jan Jedlička (1944), an artist not well known in his home country (CZ)  but regularly holding exhibitions in the most prestigious galleries abroad, was published on the occasion of the great retrospective of the author at Centro Arte Moderne e Contemporanea in La Spezia, Italy. Jan Jedlička, a graduate of Čepelák’s graphic studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, emigrated to Zurich in 1969. Since the beginning of 1980s, his life long inspiration has been the Maremma region in southern Tuscany. He started mapping it using different media – he painted, he collected various kinds of minerals, soils, sands and road dust to prepare pigments documenting the colours of the country and fixated them as pictures; he photographed; he documented the specific light conditions in small mezzotints suggesting photographic memories, similarly as in watercolours. He gradually moved to large mezzotints, photogravures and serigraphs. His other theme was the passage of time while walking through the country. He created cartographic drawings showing the changes perceived while moving. Film and later video became important media for him, connecting time, image and sound. The monograph mapping thirty years of Jedlička’s career is divided into sections based on the individual art media and is complemented with biography, list of exhibitions, filmography, and bibliography. It is published in an Italian-English language version.