MICHAL GABRIEL
STORIES OF MICHAL GABRIEL
(author: Jiří Olič, translation: Lucie Vidmarová)
THE SO-CALLED EARLY WORK
It could be said that an artist's early work usually includes everything that is to be expressed later, even though a theme that may only be a mere suggestion at the beginning is to be later portrayed with much more accuracy and gravity. In the case of sculptor Michal Gabriel, this is definitely the truth. From the very beginning of his artistic career, he was aware that the most significant thing a sculptor or a painter can express is figure. Michal Gabriel himself said: "For me, figure has always been a priority. I think that an artist cannot possibly begin other than by coping with this form."
Therefore, Gabriel's first works - portrait studies created in the beginning of his studies at the Prague Academy in 1982 - are figural, as are his works from 1986 (executed for Kurt Gebauer) for the World Exhibition in Vancouver. Figural is also the clay sculpture Lutenist from 1983.
At that time, Michal Gabriel was just beginning his artistic training, and just developing an admiration for the pottery of the Mayas, and at the same time for the modern sculpture of Henry Moore. This resulted in sculptures conceived in the Moore style, i.e. works emphasizing the form and the whole rather than the expression and detail. The Moore influence was also expressed in works which helped Gabriel realize that the sculpture is a resultant, an accord of surface, volumes, matter and empty places - those "holes" that connect the sculpture with the world and revive it in a unique way. After all, it is this three-dimensional "restoration" of the world (which delivers works reminiscent of human beings, animals and plants) that elevates the field of sculpture to the peak of creativity, which does not necessarily have to be an artistic one. We can only add that no sculptor creates a lute-player; he or she only creates a sculpture that may or may not resemble the musician.
Figural works therefore constitute the basis and the substantial part of Gabriel's work. Everyone who writes about his work must return to them, as did the artist himself. Gabriel's early work of the mentioned period includes two important sculptures - the ceramic Tree on a Hill and the sculpture Three Dogs. The latter may serve as an example of how the sculptor in his initial stage coped with the work of Alberto Giacometti; work of a stylistic bravura, maybe even too dazzling and seductive for the Czech environment.
The sculpture Tree on a Hill (1985, ceramics) is characteristic for the way in which it was created: it was rather "built" than modelled, as swallows build their nests - gradually and in horizontal layers. Another interesting aspect of the Tree was the principle of the inner struts, hidden inside the work and thus invisible for the viewer, but nevertheless creating a certain kind of inner labyrinth. The ceramic structure of the tree is more reminiscent of some archaic construction or vessel.
The Tree therefore remained not only a subject but also a phenomenon in the work of Michal Gabriel; work which was connected with landscape from the very beginning - a very rare theme in the field of sculpture. Similarly, Gabriel's Cube can (and must be) understood as the fascination by geometry which stands at the very foun dations of plastic perception: however, this cube is rather a certain kind of vegetation which horizontally and vertically grows through itself and at the same time collapses. Yet this sculpture of moderate dimensions eventually leads to the grandiose imitation of Indonesian jungle, created (in cooperation with other two artists) twenty years later!
A significant subject which repeats itself in Gabriel's work in various forms is that of the animal. In 1985, the animal was represented in Three Dogs - a sculpture made of textile, paper and wires. In this case, the animals are situated on each other's backs. Again, the substance of the work does not lie in the emphasis on the details, but in the expressiveness and in the sculptor's emotions in their pure state.
This expressive character - which is first of all the expression of the artist's personality and the part of his talents in a wider context - was undoubtedly connected with the Neo-Expressionist tendencies of the mid-1980s in the then-Czechoslovakia with which the arriving generation of painters and sculptors identified itself; i.e. artists who presented their works at the semi-illegal exhibitions called "Confrontations" - and, of course, at totally private exhibitions held in flats. As a student of the Prague Academy, Michal Gabriel participated at three of the four "Confrontations" - the second, third and last one. However, I do not consider his work of the mid-1980s to be too closely connected with the models brought about by the tendencies of the contemporary Italian trans-avant-garde or the German Neo-Expressionism in the style of the "Neue Wilde". Students of the Prague art schools had their own subjects (identifying themselves especially with the "Kafka-like" genius loci) and at the same time were part of the scene and the phenomenon called the Prague Grotesque. A certain suggestion of this aspect can be also found in the early work of Michal Gabriel - although only as an antithesis emphasizing the clash between irony and seriousness.
The subsequent work - the Small Indian Chief from 1986 - was also inspired by the ceramics of pre-Columbian America. The figure of the local Indian chief sits in a yoga position; the position is similar to the figure of a woman that is today called Salome. Let us remember here that the titles of Gabriel's works usually emerged long after the works were created. Thus, the sculptures were not works executed on a given subject; rather, they were works whose title followed the contents.
Both taken individually and as a whole, all these works are important for the artist's future development. They are experiments - often with material whose qualities the sculptor was still verifying; tests carried out with the awareness that the main body of work is yet to come.
In the same year, 1986, Gabriel created the Egyptian Woman, a wood sculpture that is substantial and not only by the standards of his so-called Egyptian period. It is an expressive work, magnificent both due to its dimensions and the mystery of its story - which might be ancient as well as personal and contemporary.
The Birds' Tree, too, originated in the same year. After the sculpture Bird-Human, it was yet another example of the artist's interest in creatures "floating" in the air, i.e. interest in overcoming the gravity that so fatally ties to itself to art, especially works of sculpture. This work, unfortunately, did not survive under the rough conditions of the so-called "artistic production".
The early work of Michal Gabriel thus includes figures, landscapes, constructions, forests, cubes and animals: from the very beginning, it represented a set of subjects with which the sculptor was going to work in the future.
SCULPTURE AS A PUBLIC ARTFORM
A sculptor should not be known primarily as a decorator of flats and an overly diligent deliverer of art to the exhibition halls, but rather as a creator whose work is known by the public from various environments, and through which the eyes of the public can browse like through a spelling-book throughout the day. A sculpture, more than any other work, requires space; it almost desires it, and if it lacks space, it appears rejected, and thus condemned to death.
The whole issue, however, is somewhat more complicated - for sculpture realizations are not exclusively shaped by a sculptor's vision. Thus, there were times favourable to monumental works: the housing estates built anew (or only finished) in the Czech Republic in that period looked empty and a little spiritless without sculptures. The artists were commissioned a subject and worked within the form of an open competition, concluded by the announcement of results and by organizing an exhibition of all the competition designs submitted.
This is how things undoubtedly proceeded in 1988, when the architecture of the Prague housing estates Nový Barrandov [The New Barrandov], designed by engineer architect Zdeněk Hoelzel and academic architect Jan Kerel, was to be accompanied by a sculptural monument. The close vicinity of the "national" film centre in Barrandov evoked the idea of a sculpture on the subject of "film". The subject, rather broad and difficult to grasp through sculptural means, was subsequently elaborated by numerous renowned artists. One of the winning designs came from Michal Gabriel who entitled his sculpture Paegasus. Why exactly did he select the mythical winged horse, adopted by writers as the bearer of inspiration? Probably because Gabriel loved horses and spent part of his student youth mounted and in the stables.
As we know from the classical myth, the winged horse Paegasus was the favourite of the Muses at Helicon, and played an important part in the story of Bellerophon - the hero who gained fame for his great ability to resist women's temptations, but also for his daring attempt to fly to Olympus. Zeus humiliated the audacious human by sending out a gadfly to bite his horse under the tail. The hero thus fell down to Earth where he lived until the end of his miserable life, while Paegasus remained on Olympus - where he serves forever as the transferor and distributor of lightning. The bronze Paegasus by Michal Gabriel was conceived as a hybrid of the body of a horse and the wings of a glider. Its monstrously prolonged head, reminiscent of a prehistoric saurian, reminds the observer that its Greek predecessor jumped out of the decapitated body of the no less monstrous Gorgona.
The second (and probably even more monumental) set of works by the sculptor comprises the gates to the Trade Fair Palace, one of the buildings holding the collections of the National Gallery in Prague. Gabriel was recommended to the competition by the architect of the Trade Fair Palace's reconstruction, the engineer architect Miroslav Masák. On 2 January 1991, the press reported that Michal Gabriel won the competition.
Gabriel subsequently made the idea of his design more accurate in the press - in his words, it represented "the classical solution of an entrance to a significant object which was emphasized from the ancient times by 'guardians' in the real form of sculptures".
However, this was exactly the element Gabriel had to withdraw from; with regard to the dimensions of the given building, the gates had to be gigantic. The artist thus decided to decorate them with a relief in the form of two faces of guardian giants. Nevertheless, even after the announcement of the competition winner, doubts were cast upon his work. After all, in the case of competitions (which are frequently influenced by lobby groups and spoiled by unconcealed rivalry), this is a rather common phenomenon.
Another occasion when Gabriel was forced to alter his sculpture to fit the already existing architecture was his piece from 1993 for the administrative building of the Munich company Hocherl and Schlemmer. For it, Michal Gabriel created a threedimensional bronze sculpture of staircase that begins in the room nearby the entrance and leads as far as to the ceiling and to the second floor, but in fact into nowhere.
The sculpture Angel is situated on the bank house in Ostrava, a building designed by the architect Václav Červenka. The sculpture was created in 1995, modelled from clay and cast in bronze. It depicts a man with enormous reversed swallow wings. It is a vision of flight and space, but it does not represent anything angelically Baroque - in the words of the Czech poet Holan, it is what remains of an angel.
In the next year, again with the architect Václav Červenka, the sculptor began to work on the interior of a restaurant for which he created an orchidarium in cooperation with the director of the Prague Botanical Garden, Jiří R. Haager. The "intimate" sculptures of flowers cast in bronze thus have a certain continuity in Gabriel's body of work; they represent a concrete subject, as do his sculptures of trees or grass. This tendency of Gabriel's work escalated in the grandiose Gesamtkunstwerk of a jungle, created by the author in cooperation with Lukáš Rittstein and Barbora Šlapetová for the Prague ZOO in the Troja district. This work will be discussed later in more detail.
Two other Gabriel's works are dated 1996. The first of these is the Winged Leopard, a sculpture created in cooperation with architect Bořek Šípek, which was situated above the entrance to the presidential office at the Prague Castle. Here, the leopard with its butterfly wings substituted the traditional heraldic lion in a nontraditional spirit, this time truly postmodern. The second work, the Winged Lioness, has a similar form. It was created for the atrium of the Union Bank in Ostrava.
The only realized work from 1997 is the Tomb for Michal Tučný. On the request of the family of the deceased popular Czech singer, Gabriel created a sculpture in the form of a large hat made of granite.
The Altan was carved from wood in 1998 for the garden of engineer Vojtěch Trochta. Its integral part is the sculpture of a lying figure created from identical material to the floor on which it resides, i.e. a wooden board, representing the successful realization of both the fields of architecture and sculpture.
In 2000, Gabriel (in cooperation with engineer architect Zdeněk Jiran and engineer architect Michal Kohout) created a three-part window relief for the staircase of the Municipal Office in České Budějovice. The first window, made of smelted glass, is decorated by figures of clerks sitting by their tables. Here, the artist used an older motif, applied in his earlier sculpture Copying Clerk. The central window bears the motto of the Municipal Office "Shall you subdue your worries to the community!", ornamentally accompanied by a set of South-Bohemian coats-of-arms. The third window repetitively displays the characteristic motif of the region - carp fishes. A totally exceptional work in Gabriel's career was the Public Fountain made for Hradec Králové, on which the sculptor cooperated with engineer architect Oleg Haman. The fountain was cast as a whole from chrome-nickel steel with a polished surface. The optically expressive surface of the object is accompanied by three neon tubes connected to it along its periphery. The Public Fountain thus represents and embodies both fine and applied arts - for it is not only visited and watched by the public, but also used by them.
In 2002 and in cooperation with engineers architects Ladislav Kuba and Tomáš Pilař, Michal Gabriel created the sculpture Tree Trunk for the garden of the newly established library of the Philosophical Faculty of the Moravian University in Brno. Gabriel's most recent realization (besides the Indonesian jungle) is his sculpture Cyclot, situated in the Prague park Hadovka in 2004.
THOSE JOLLY YEARS OF ART GROUPS
On 3 June 1987, several fine artists gathered in the Moravian-Slovakian Box of the Municipal House in Prague under the management of Václav Marhoul, in order to establish the art group Hardheads [Tvrdohlaví]. Michal Gabriel wrote a recollection on the group's foundation, a certain kind of brief summary of what was most important to the event: "Already during our studies - in the atmosphere of changes already being sensed, when the exhibitions of the non-prominent artists were becoming a long-awaited event - my colleagues and painters Jiří David and Stanislav Diviš asked a few of their colleagues to establish an art group. This group consisted of: Jiří David, Stanislav Diviš, Zdeněk Lhotský, Petr Nikl, František Skála, Stefan Milkov, Jaroslav Róna, Čestmír Suška, Michal Gabriel and Václav Marhoul. These people had already met several times before at the illegal confrontation exhibitions. The group was established despite the ban on associating outside the officially approved structures, and it thus initiated the foundation of numerous other artistic groups. The Hardheads group organized three extensive and largely successful exhibitions, and because all its members were strong personalities, they parted after some time, too."
The Hardheads group first appeared before the public eye at its first group exhibition opened on 22 December 1987 in Lidový dům [the People's House] in the Prague district of Vysočany. This exhibition - held "legally" albeit outside the omnipotent official Union of Fine Artists [Svaz výtvarných umělců] - turned into an unprecedented and famous event. Its importance far exceeded the importance of the first, although very significant, exhibition of an art group; it became an impulse for many subsequent events which gradually and with increasing intensity would become acts aimed against the Communist regime. It is, however, necessary to point out that the Hardheads were not merely a group of the type of artist-dissidents whose main aim - and perhaps only meaningful sense of "life and work" - was political protest.
We must remind the reader of two minor details. For Michal Gabriel, the establishment of the group on 3 June 1987 was also a date of very personal and family significance; on that day, Gabriel also celebrated the birth of his first child - his daughter Marie. The two events - the celebration of his daughter's birth and the establishment of the art group - were thus combined into a single magnificent whole. An important part was played especially by the three bottles of Calvados which Michal brought to the box of the Municipal House, and also by a plate of traditional Czech open sandwiches smelling somewhat of polyester resin (for, on that memorable day, the artist worked on his sculpture Copying Clerk). Let us accompany this historical detail with the fact that Gabriel did not present this particular sculpture at the first group exhibition; the work was finished only as late as in the following year 1988.
The sculpture is nevertheless significant and perfect, and as such, it has lived to see several author's replicas as well as paraphrases. Already at the time of its creation, it represented a certain kind of synthesis of the earlier "Egyptian" and the artist's later conception of a sculpture. Gabriel subsequently created a form of it and made three casts of it. As concerns the casts, the artist worked with coloured polystyrene in the same way as in the original; polystyrene would gradually become a material favoured by and very popular with the public as well as with artists.
Gabriel himself claims about the genesis of the work: "The Copying Clerk is a sculpture in which I combined a historical subject - arriving from the subject of the sculpture of an Egyptian copying clerk - with the Kafka-like subject of a clerk and with the form which respects the motion between the irony and the serious sculpture. I have modelled a vessel on the clerk's table and inserted a flower into it... The accent of the sculpture as a whole was contained in its eyes, two inset strass-pink artificial stones. It took me a while to select the right colour for the eyes; a colour that would not appear pathetic, would correctly merge with the colour of the sculpture and at the same time would remain expressive and striking."
The copying clerk as conceived by Michal Gabriel represented a subject of many meanings, and was undoubtedly also intended as an expression of reality and of the figure of an artist whose fate, in the then-Czechoslovak, was to proceed from one clerk to another in a vicious circle. The political context, however, has been swallowed up by time. All that remains is the expression of the majesty and monumentality of the individual person and its position - surviving all regimes and governments.
At the first group exhibition of the Hardheads, Gabriel presented the Egyptian Woman, Tree, Pilgrim and Grass - sculptures rather varied in character, but at the same time embodying certain archetypes that would become the main subjects of the artist's future work. In this sense, the sculpture Pilgrim from 1987 is a very substantial work for Gabriel's career. Both the sculpture's form - it is composed from a single piece - and its "body" of the sculpture encompass not only the figure of the pilgrim (walker), but also the rather mysterious animal. Moreover - and this is unusual for Gabriel - there is also the rod which is closed by a vessel intended for a fresh flower, and which at the same time winds around the animal and at its other end is directed towards the other hand of the figure.
This dynamics of limbs and their "runner-like" continuation - the two elements which connect the body with the earth and literally ground it - are later repeated in Gabriel's work in the experimental figures of Cyclots. The result was a sculpture which was both "postmodern" and "Egyptian" in the sense that we do not know neither its purpose (is it a monument, or solely a flower pot?) nor its story. The story is suggested - but it is veiled by the perfectly opaque majesty.
The sculpture discussed represents a certain counterpart to the Egyptian Woman from 1986 - as the latter was Gabriel's first large figurative sculpture. The title Egyptian Woman was, however, given to the piece only subsequently, by the viewers. The artist himself admits that he was inspired by the old Sumerian and Egyptian sculptures which fascinated him by their firm form and colour palette, and especially by the emphasis laid by the old masters on the expression of the eyes: "I wanted to provide my sculpture with the sharp look which can be found for example in the Sumerian sculptures, and I wanted it to possess the severity, simplicity and monumentality of the Egyptians."
From this sculpture, the link leads to the subsequent figures of Woman - works coloured and expressive, but much more complex from the formal and sculptural point of view.
The sculpture entitled Grass - another one presented at the first exhibition of the Hardheads group - can be understood as the beginning of yet another tendency in the work of Michal Gabriel; the influence of the world of vegetation, which the artist developed in various sculptures of trees and flowers culminating in the abovementioned work on the "jungle" for the ZOO in the Prague district of Troja.
The varied character of Gabriel's works at the first exhibition of the Hardheads was undoubtedly a great contribution to the whole which at that time seduced reviewers to rather simplified explanations; especially when they began to analyze the "group" aesthetics and programs, which of course never existed.
The success of the first Hardheads exhibition was, nevertheless, incomparable to any other similar event. This was at least partly because it was understood as an open manifest against the regime and its policy (being held almost two years before the renowned '89 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution). For the public, the exhibition was a bit of a performance, but, for the group members, it signified much more - it brought a signum of significance to them; and it also represented the new prestige and an input, as well as an obligation for the years to come.
At the same time, it was the beginning of a myth, both in the positive and negative sense - the beginning of a legend of an insurmountable beginning. The two subsequent exhibitions of the Hardheads group, held in 1989 and 1991, were therefore observed with much more criticism. It was discovered - and later also criticized - that the group excessively adhered to archaisms and also stood upon an inappropriate exoticism; the unfortunate results of a lack of courage to find new ways and of the beginning of the group's stagnation.
The work of Michal Gabriel somehow surmounted these reprehensions. First of all (and mainly), new subjects and new dimensions of fantasy and of stylistic transformation began to appear in its framework at that time. Secondly, Gabriel's work was already understood as a "classical" one, undoubted in its quality. Possibly the only "internal" critique, published in the catalogue accompanying the Hardheads exhibition in Havířov, was the text of "Vítězslav Konrád" (real name Jiří David, a member of the group) who - already in 1988 when writing the text and several months after the successful premiere - asked himself a rhetorical question: "What is the true face of the Hardheads?" In this question, David explicitly suggested that there are at least two faces; the true face and the face put on for the public.
According to this rather severe, but probably useful self-reflection, Gabriel was "stiffly archaic and illustrative". But contrary to the much more relaxed painting, the essentially three-dimensional field of sculpture must always contain a speck of conservative stiffness and monumentality whose effect - apart from the dating effect of the overall political and social situation in Czechoslovakia of the given period - is timeless. When the Czechoslovak exhibition, designed by engineer Petr Zeman, was awarded the main prize at the West-German "Buntesgantenschau 89", it was undoubtedly also thanks to Michal Gabriel and his sculpture Bureaucrat (i.e. Copying Clerk presented under a new title).
The second group exhibition of the Hardheads, launched on 2 September 1989 in one of Prague's small exhibition halls, nevertheless became the major event of the artistic season - for it was organized almost exactly two years after the group's premiere. Thus, some surprise was definitely awaited; but in truth, only a fool could have expected an artistic sensation. Albeit all this, the results of the event - conceived rather generously and first of all as a festive event and a spectacle - exceeded all realistic expectations.
At this exhibition, Michal Gabriel attracted both viewers and art critics, especially as the author of the Dignitary. Michael Třeštík highly appreciated the work in his review of the exhibition, emphasizing "the remarkable ethos of the author". To be a contemporary artist also definitely meant that a sculptor (or a painter) was more than ever condemned to stand up on a public stage with his or her works; to defend and describe the actual subjects, and thus to confront the aesthetics with the ethics in a small, banal way. Gabriel created his Dignitary as his hitherto largestdimensional ceramic sculpture.
Apart from the Dignitary, Gabriel presented his "series of signs" at the exhibition -represented by figural, 100 cm-high ceramic sculptures (Czech Lion, The Gate, Škoda Factory Logo, Offspring, and Star). All these signs, symbols, attributes and things had one feature in common: they formed the head of a two-legged figure. They, however, expressed wide range of various ideas: from a gun personifying the world of the aggressive, of violence and stupidity, as far as to the sign of a gate which Gabriel used to spot on all trams of that period, displaying the coat-of-arms of the City of Prague - and thus appropriated it completely, even with the symbolical bent hand holding a sword.
In this cycle of signs, the sculptor seemed to react to the work of his colleagues from the group - the painters Jiří David and Stanislav Diviš, who applied similar symbols and incorporated maps of the Czech Republic, tricolours and panoramic views of Prague into their paintings. They, however, situated these signs into different contexts, and on the background of "social bleakness" also gave them different sense than the painters working with pathos or with the grotesque. In the sculptures of Michal Gabriel, however, the primary aim was artistic - which prevented these works from misuse by the one-sided and short-term purposes of propaganda.
Seen from today's perspective, these ceramic sculptures testify to the influence of the individual members of the group on each other. The sculptures were created in a brief but very fertile and interesting stage of Gabriel's career.
As a whole, the works were characterized by parallel working on various subjects and by using varied materials, a method which was to become a certain norm for Gabriel in the future. On the third and last group exhibition of the Hardheads, opened on 12 September 1991 in the Municipal Library in Prague, these tendencies appeared again - once more, especially in Michal Gabriel's sculptures. Critics described these tendencies as a positive quality of the artist's work, already able to do without the irony and sarcasm of the previous period.
THE NEW BEGINNINGS OF OLD STORIES
In March 1988, Michal Gabriel exhibited in the gallery Na bidýlku [On the Perch] in Brno. Reproductions of his sculptures and drawings in the accompanying catalogue as if were to emphasize the main tendency of Gabriel's work. The sculptor, through the exhibited works, displayed his wide span of interest and at the same time pointed out his development at the end of the 1980s, marked by searching for something new; something that would surmount the cliché of the "postmodern" - an expression whose contents had begun to be perceived in a rather negative way.
However, this development could not deny the fact that the basis of the arts remains the art of returning, the art of narrating old stories in a new way, and also of polishing up myths that are still green and full of life. If we talk about the development, transformations and experiments which accompany the arts, we must also mention that the exhibition was held only a few months after the first public appearance of the Hardheads.
The author of the catalogue text, Ivona Raimanová, classified Michal Gabriel into the artistic tendency of the 1980s which "re-opens the door to the narrative, to allegory and symbol". By the narrative of the work, Raimanová did not mean only its communicativeness (onto which the majority of modernists of the previous period did not cling too much), but also the indicative character of stories which are ancient and repeat themselves. And although the space for telling a story is rather limited for a sculptor (contrary to a painter), the sculptor works with volumes and weight, and thus can paradoxically express the reticence of his figures - figures both archaic and mythical as well as contemporary. Ivona Raimanová also noticed the great emphasis laid by Michal Gabriel on the variety of materials used, whether these are plastics (polyester, epoxy, laminate) or natural and traditional materials (wood, clay, plaster, bronze). They all served as the basis for the "immobile, reposing figures" whose sculptural magic fascinated the viewers then, and astonishes them today. Raimanová thus raised the question of whether "eternal" art acquires this quality through repetition which is - as we know very well - only illusory. Such art always contains at least a sparkle of innovation, and thus also originality, as it neither imitates nor parodies, but interprets.
The Brno exhibition, however, did not present Gabriel only as the interpreter of ancient sculptures, as he was known from the Hardheads exhibitions; it also introduced him as the creator of remarkable drawings and watercolours which, exhibited as a whole, suggested a much larger span of work and pointed out at certain "hidden" motifs which it was (till then?) possible to render only through painting.
If the artists of the Czech "postmodernism" were - either justly or unjustly - reprehended for playfulness, Gabriel's works astonished by their facility and a certain matter-of-factness of form, i.e. a quality that does not contradict fantasy. It was something substantially different from the "post-modern short-spanned memory of the strawberry ice cream", as was the headline of one of my texts from that time. The title was to evoke the froth and the white noise of the period which made itself look very light-minded, even blasé.
WEEPING ON THE WRONG GRAVE OF POSTMODERNISM
The year 1991 was significant for Michal Gabriel for several reasons. In May, the sculptor held his first solo exhibition in the Pi-Pi-Art gallery in Prague. It was entitled "Sentences of Space" and presented the new stage in his work: sculptures conceived as spatial poems which helped the artist to grasp the word in its elementary substance, and not only as a pure metaphor or a symbol.
It was also the year when Michal Gabriel displayed his sculptures (and especially those described as "abstract") at the group exhibition "The Other Geometry". In the accompanying catalogue, art historian Josef Hlaváček wrote: "It seems to me that Michal Gabriel, the intrinsic sculptor, today moves apart from any postmodern - or for that matter, any other - coordinates. He searches for his neverending sculptures (they are neverending if we walk around them; neverending, for one volume thus permeats another) in massive blocks where the geometric forms transform into organic ones and vice versa. His sculptures are dialogues about relations and relationships and about disengaging of the organic from the construction and of the construction from the organic: they are the parable of the all-creative existence."
The author of this text has precisely described the mainly reversible transformation of the organic into the geometric in Gabriel's sculpture. However, so-called "postmodernism" was much more complicated. In the beginning, the term "postmodernism" was merely auxiliary. Moreover, it represented an excessively vague description of tendencies that (in a very likeable way) animated the art scene and other cultural milieux of the mid-1980s. This term is not applied to the early work of Michal Gabriel wilfully, but very logically and in the spirit of the work. Moreover, the term is not applied because we are firmly convinced that this very artist would express the postmodern principles in any extraordinary and characteristic way, or that he as a "postmodernist" would fight against the classical modernism.
Nevertheless, Gabriel's early work was striking for this thematic searching which would later be called "aesthetic nomadism" - the quotations of archetypes and myths of past epochs, the appropriation of subjects from both the ancient and recent past as well as of other elements of the "1980s style" - with such a grandiose ease and playfulness - even in the areas hermetically locked by mystery and faith. But that was just the past. In 1991, the term "postmodernism" took upon a rather pejorative meaning and was used to label almost anything.
The third exhibition of the Hardheads group was enthusiastically described by the Czech nestor Egon Bondy as follows: "Here, the postmodern simply presents itself in its most vital form." I do not think that Bondy was wrong; but it was just a proclamation that made a virtue of a necessity by giving a name to the process - but the process, as we all know, always precedes the labelling. All labels arrive subsequently; and sometimes, one even cannot find the right term to describe the particular stages and phenomena, especially the transitional ones.
At the same time, it is interesting to note that until today, there is not a single term yet to describe the artistic efforts of the early 1990s in the Czech Republic. The period was unique, and the time seemed to accelerate. But there were also other art groups and art tendencies, or just shifts in aesthetics at that time; and compared to them, the Hardheads group seemed a bit old-fashioned and - as one reviewer wrote - "stiffened". In his review, Petr Nedoma, along with many others, rejected the validity of the attribute "postmodern". I, too, knew at that time, that this attribute no longer described the up-to-date reality and continuing development that the fine arts are subject to. And thus, all that often remained was to weep on the wrong grave of postmodernism. And because postmodernism was often used merely to describe all in the art world that was chaotic, there was nothing to regret. At the third exhibition of the Hardheads, Michal Gabriel presented sculptures experimenting on several levels. It was, to quote Petr Nedoma again, Gabriel's "attempt to arrive at the synthesis of two levels of his work - the combination of wooden sculpture with material assemblages in plexiglass boxes"; an attempt evoking "puzzled impression". Nedoma was far from isolated in his opinion.
But these boxes and "aquariums" did not merely evoke the era of Artificialism and Surrealism and the objects of Štyrský and Rykr. First of all, they were substantially new works, representing utterly new ground in Gabriel's carreer - precious lyrical gesture and proof that sculpture as an artistic genre can work even with the material reality on the edge between fantasy and miracle.
The sculptures that Michal Gabriel exhibited at the third group exhibition of the Hardheads, were accepted more or less positively; any substantial rebukes were missing. On the other hand, the group - by then more or less a household word in the history of modern Czech fine arts (or postmodern fine arts, if you wish) - was found to be somehow arrested in its development. On 19 November 1991 - the day before the third exhibition's derniere - the group was disbanded. The act was preceded by voting and by boisterous discussion, but the result nevertheless represented a small sensation for the Czech artistic scene. The split of the Hardheads group was an act of necessity. It expressed the individual needs of its members; their need to go on and not to rely on the group's trademark, which had ensured a non-problematic stability. Within the new conditions of the "market economy" - which also became increasingly valid in the field of fine arts - such stability was moreover impossible to ensure solely through membership of artistic groups. The early 1990s nevertheless ranked among the most fertile periods in the work of the group's members; it might even be that they all sensed the modesty to come in the following, less successful years.
It was the period of individual exploration, the period of working in several directions. The time had come to experiment - especially for Michal Gabriel.
COLOUR, MOTION, MATTER
Michal Gabriel was - as was any sculptor following his or her convictions and needs - well aware of his priorities, but also of the limitations that have always been inherent to the art of sculpture, such as the fact that the sculpture is, in its very substance, immovable.
For centuries, the field of sculpture had the reputation of a very conservative artistic genre, confined almost exclusively to churches, palaces and public spaces. It was only with the arrival of the modern era and its concomitant art that everything began to change.
And so, in the early 20th century - in the time of avant-garde when art as a whole was in motion (and at the same time becoming increasingly intricate, and even worse, unintelligible) - a sculptor was perceived as the "arranger of chaos". If we recall that in ancient Egypt, the word for "sculptor" meant "the one who revives", the progress in development does not seem that radical.
But sculpture more than any other field involved the tradition of craft, i.e. the material and technological perfection of execution regarding surfaces and volumes, and the appropriate use of materials. Auguste Rodin certainly was not the first one to prefer a craftsman to a dreamer; Rodin moreover possessed the gift of anticipation when he found the "cubic element" in everything and said that his sculpture is good because it is geometric. However, he knew more than he was able to physically realize in his work, characterized as it was by the period echoes of Symbolism and by his tendencies towards "psychologism".
Cubism, which Rodin lived to see, was nevertheless rejected by the sculptor. Conversely, Rodin's admirer in the Czech lands - sculptor Otto Gutfreund - accepted it, albeit only as an "abstract, pure form which does not come from this world" and with which help he would achieve the impression of fiction. In the course of many decades to come, it seemed almost impossible to follow up on Cubism creatively; this tendency represented a closed experiment and an utterly exhausted system. Only the sculptors and painters of the "postmodern" generation around 1990 would be able to adopt the Cubist experiment and "recycle" it in their own way. This was also the case with several members of the Hardheads Group, especially Jaroslav Róna and Michal Gabriel. They created sculptures of cubes, cylinders, pyramids and spheres that solved the problem of volume, surface and space in a different way to the "classical" Cubism. First of all, the artists did not limit themselves to the traditional Cubist subjects and did not aestheticize as the original Cubists did; they did not create sculptures of Don Quixotes, Hamlets and Cellists as cabinet pieces blended perfectly with the plinths. Gabriel was influenced not only by Gutfreund's utterly exceptional Cubist work but also by works from his Civilist period - social reality seen through the prism of New Objectivity. Gabriel's sculpture Worker from 1990 (unique in his work) displays certain reflections of these two sources of inspiration. The Cubist Dancer, possibly Gabriel's most wildly coloured sculpture, was created in the same year. In the Cubist-like Figure II from 1995, on the contrary, the sculptor realized that the decisive aspect is the dynamics of cubes, vitiated not only by the patterns of wood and cracks but also by the expressive colouring.
Sculpture were coloured as a matter of course in Gabriel's work from the very beginning, but for centuries the problem of sculpture was not the colour but the plinth. Figuratively speaking, while the sculpture represented freedom, the plinth subjugated and disturbed it. In the field of sculpture, the plinth was necessary as the stabilizing element, but, in result, the work had to be perceived along with it, as a whole. The plinth shifted the centre of gravity and changed the work's composition. Michal Gabriel solved this problem with a sculpture that can exist in any position and in any environment; it can be even hung in space. This problem is undoubtedly connected with the idea expressed by the artist at the opening of his exhibition at the Old Town Hall in Prague in 1994 - the idea of a sculpture as a spaceship travelling through the weightless outer space. True, it would not have any viewers; but works of art inaccessible to viewing (either locked in safes or buried under desert sand) are in no way exceptional. Every work of art has enough time to wait for its viewer.
Yet another problem was how to connect the sculpture with motion. This idea was not new. It is said that already in ancient Egypt under the rule of Rameses II, a robotic figure of a man was created. An old legend of Prague tells of the monstrous figure of the Golem who came to life after a shem was inserted into his forehead. There are innumerable mobile sculptures in the form of amusing trifles, and the sculptures that spouted water or that were turned or moved by wind did not lack motion, either.
Surprisingly in modern art, the idea of connecting sculpture with motion asserted itself only slowly. It was first established in the framework of Futurism which emphasized dynamism and considered "motion" its key term - but even in Futurism, this occurred only as late as 1915 when the first kinetic sculpture was constructed by Giacomo Balla. After Calder's experiments, many artists took hold of the idea and created kinetic sculptures. But neither in historical nor modern times, the real problem was not in kinetic sculpture but in sculpture with an inner motion. "I am trying to imbue the static sculptural form with motion, and thus with life - to set a sculpture into motion; or, more exactly, to set a figural sculpture into motion. There are many kinetic sculptures, but they are abstract and their motion is connected with the motion of the whole matter," wrote Michal Gabriel in one of his texts.
Gabriel's first "kinetic" sculpture is Landscape from 1991. The sculptor situated a landscape made of wood, moss, pine needle and beeswax into a plexiglass box and combined it with computer displays (connected to an electrical source which switched on and off chaotically). Gabriel then presented the first kinetic-virtual experiment at an exhibition entitled "Orbis Fictus", held in the Prague Wallenstein Riding School in 1995. It was a virtual sculpture projected onto a screen, created by a computer processing a "classical" bronze sculpture.
Two years later, in October 1997, the sculptor first exhibited a sculpture consisting of a cylinder situated on a plinth with a red-lit lizard running over the inside of it, as well as other works containing running water and swimming fish - all in electronic simulation and in virtual form. This idea (contributed by Gabriel's long-time friend Josef Švanda, art-lover and technical advisor who stood behind the birth of all Gabriel's electronic sculptures) was later perfected and the lizard began to run across the body of a sculpture of a girl.
The little animal did not move smoothly; its jerky motion corresponded with the natural reality and behaviour of animals that spend most of their lives in a state of emergency and in the expectation of the next moment. A similar example was the female figure standing on her head, with a virtual snake crawling along her spine, proceeding to her chest and belly and into between her legs, and then returning to her back. "The snake is a symbol without motion, it is just an ornament," says the sculptor. But it is also a sexual symbol, especially in the Eastern spiritual traditions - Hinduism, Taoism and, mainly, Tantrism.
From the beginning, the problem thus was not a sculpture moving in the manner of a mechanical toy, but the motion within the sculpture, the combination of the figure's inner dynamics with motion.
The dynamism of figures was emphasized by their posture. These were figures of women and men in positions that in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions do not serve only for meditation but also revive body and soul and largely emphasize the sources of energy and its shifts.
STRUCTURES AND OBJECTS OF NATURE: TWO EXPERIMENTS AND TWO STORIES
By the structure of sculpture, we do not only mean its surface but also its substance, its inner arrangement. The characteristic "nut design" of Michal Gabriel's sculptures thus does not represent any decorative element but expresses the elementary idea of the work. Structure in this conception therefore represents an expression (an imprint) of the world that is being born and that further exists in the unity of the vegetative, animal and human kingdoms. The imprint of a nut is thus embodied in the elementary genetic, and thus construction unit of the work. However, it is also a living being - not only because it is born and because it develops, but also because it embodies a myth that would be otherwise solely a fairy-tale, solely a beautiful lie. The nut structure was given to the herd of beasts of prey (looking like leopards) as well as to the sculpture Shepherd. "We are of the same kin, you and I," the structure says.
The beginnings, however, were much more modest. Experimenting with structures began with the sculpture created of wax and acorn tops, and balls of the dimension of a golf ball. Thus, a certain mythical fruit and, in its continuation, a tree trunk (equally botanically indeterminable) were created. But the tree split into a figure accompanied by a hat in which the nutshells represented not only the structure but also its most important part. This was the first experiment and its first story. It occurred at a time when Michal Gabriel crated wax sculptures and subsequently cast them in bronze using the lost wax technique.
The first structure-ball was part of one of the objects enclosed in the plexiglass box. It was followed by Bust - a structural head - and then by a resin sculpture of a dog.
The Chair, similarly composed of a structure of monkey-nut shells, seems to be solely a detour from Gabriel's expressively and specifically figurative work; but it proved to be an excellent "foundation" for the experiment in process. The concept that "the chair is rather vegetative in its effect" was part of the logic of the work; a work which seemed to grow from the ground. But this was not the vegetative effect of runners and tendrils - i.e. the decorativeness so popular with the Art Deco artists - but the fundamental vegetativeness that was to fulfil the ideal of "vegetative sculpture". A simple and functional object, and moreover: an artwork. The artist himself says: "I made full use of freedom and constructed the chair first of all as an objet d'art, at the same time keeping in mind that it is still a chair and that I do not want to give it any other meanings. Thus, contrary to the modern design which especially presents beauty born out of functionality and simplicity, I present beauty born out of sculptures."
And thus, the "vegetative sculpture" was created, which can be represented even by a chair. (In the vegetative nature, however, everything as if either stood or lied; nothing sits and rests! This can be compared to the creatures who, in danger, begin to imitate a leaf or a branch, thus returning to the vegetative and imitating it. The behaviour of artists is similar; in the period when they are under the threat of being creatively exhausted, they return and become inspired by the world which is archaically vegetative.)
In the work of Michal Gabriel, structures and their stories however continued and the following significant work was the threesome of sculptures entitled Old Story. The wooden sculpture of a woman standing on one leg existed yet before this work, but it was sold, similarly as its replica. But the author made a form of the replica and gradually cast it in resin three times. Thus, he created three sculptures - the initial fundament - and each one of them was provided with a different structure. The first sculpture is composed of walnut shells arranged in parallel lines. It was reminiscent of archaic sculptures from Benin as well as of some figural works of the art of the Greek Classical Antiquity.
The choice of material was important due to what the walnut symbolizes, and what it suggests by its shape. Its circular shape can symbolize a head, but its articulated globular kernel is reminiscent of a brain. The walnut shell without the kernel has long fascinated the artist and, as he himself claimed, "gazed at me with their empty eye-sockets like small skulls".
The structure of the second sculpture consists of peanut shells, again arranged into lines. The elongated shape of the shells corresponded with the shape of the figure. Similarly, the third version was created from pistachio shells.
The whole threesome, reminiscent of the Three Graces, was - as usual - only later entitled Old Theme and presented at the group exhibition of Michal Gabriel and Jan Merta. The title of the work was left to be decided by the circumstances and time: as has been said before, the titles of Gabriel's works are almost never important or primary. The subject, taken from the classical mythology, is connected with the work only by suggestion - a myth about an uneasy and almost impossible choice. The simultaneous sameness and otherness of the work pose a challenge both to the artist and the collector. (The myth about the uneasiness and the impossibility of choice, after all, climaxes in the writer, dandy and aristocrat d'Aurevilly who rejects the possibility of constant choice, leaving it to the servants).
The Old Theme thus represents work that may depart from the sameness of form, but - through various structures - heads towards individualization, towards different identity.
A "vegetative sculpture" in the most original sense of the word was the sculpture that formed part of the orchidarium, created in 1988. It was made of resin, but was also composed of snail shells and orchids growing through it.
It was only later when these works were followed by other "vegetative" sculptures of the chair and subsequently by sculptures of animals - feline birds of prey. The first two animal sculptures were accompanied by the sculptor by the figure with a stick (a shepherd, or guardian) and exhibited in the Trade Fair Palace in Prague in 2001. The whole group was entitled Story.
An independent story was Gabriel's search for technology and the most appropriate material that would ensure durability and would not peel off. The most appropriate material gradually became the halves of walnut shells - used for the chair at the same time as Old Theme. The first variant of the chair was made of walnuts, the second of acorn cups.
The return to the acorn brought about both new structure and new possibilities. On smaller models of the female sculpture standing on her head, the artist tested a whole variety of colours and materials. Thus, he created a figure made of acorn cups and resin in chocolate brown, then a variant in red and a bronze cast. These were followed by a similar sculpture, but this time made of peach stones cut lengthwise. The experiments brought about changes of structure, and concave forms were embellished with decorative cuts - like fabric on the body of a figure. The halves of peach stones also proved to be an ideal material for the five types of chairs, which, cast in laminate, may have equal shapes, but different structures.
A new priority was necessary - the collecting of peach stones and later their acquisition from the canning and stewed-fruit factories.
The experiment with the products of nature in fact had an identical beginning to the experiment with the structures. At the beginning, there are products of nature depicted both in sculpture and as a vision in plexiglass boxes, created and exhibited by the artist in the Prague Pi-Pi-Art gallery in 1991, and also a bronze cast of a pumpkin, created by the lost wax technique.
However, we know that the products of nature (minerals, plants, animals) are the subject of scientific and natural historical research, but can be and are the subject of the work and research of artists. In the work of Michal Gabriel, they represent an independent tendency. Apart from the natural component, they include objects, products and waste of civilization. Cast in bronze, they subsequently encounter each other in unexpected contexts and on unexpected levels and create wondrous wholes whose only sense are the new form and shape. And thus for Gabriel, a narcissus grows from the bronze cast of a water bottle, while the blue-green patina of the object represents the element of time called to a halt in 2003, i.e. the year when the work was created.
In the same year, Gabriel created the bronze Landscape from Mars. The bronze material of these products of nature ensures durability, and the technology brings about the original character of the work, for it has been enriched with more complex elements impossible to finish through casting - they are created separately for each sculpture. The original material - wax - determines the more or less intimate dimensions. Later, wax was accompanied by other organic materials that also melt or burn out during casting. The sculptor used plastic in the case of the Drilling Machine from 2003. Its imprint, too, is reminiscent of a fossil, a product of nature: the bronze permeates as far as the cavities, thus creating grottos and certain "flaws" of the work. These flaws, however, can be used or only slightly finished in the sense of the whole which is unexpected, first surprising the author and later the viewer.
While burning, the plastic case of the drilling machine's case turned gritty. When the artist slightly polished the surface, the work acquired its specific structure. The initial material of the "products of nature" used by Gabriel is more than varied; it can include a cone of coniferous tree, an old plastic outlet, houseleek shoots or the top of a milk can. Contrary to the Surrealist encounters of the "miraculous" or the dreamy, the artist here does not combine meanings, but shapes and forms. Bronze mends everything invisibly, the meaning is meaningless. In the most recent of Gabriel's works, casts of stinkhorn and Roman cauliflower are waiting for their future life in bronze.
Products of nature thus represent the experimental tendency in the work of Michal Gabriel. They give freedom to the artist and, from the very beginning, are compositions created from varied materials. They are places of unexpected encounters, and, transferred into the medium of bronze, also twin crystallizations of objects of technical civilisation and the world of nature.
UNTITLED
Twin crystals of various geometric solid bodies (and moreover, sometimes combinations of numerous materials), which the sculptor created in 1990, often have the name Untitled. This expresses the fact that the primary principle here is not the title of the work but the creative process - and a certain higher sense that the work will subsequently find its name. Giving names to particular works, as well as to the bulk of work as a whole, never had any special importance for Michal Gabriel; his work is not literal. In the "Egyptian" period, nomenclature was nevertheless often "grasped" literally, for it directly offered various possibilities of explanation. But the field of sculpture is a medium of changes, and the more abstract it is, the more possibilities for explanation it offers.
This all probably began in the summer of 1989, during Gabriel's sojourn to the Summer Academy in the Austrian Graz where the sculptor arrived at the necessity of a substantial turn in his work. He reacted by the change of his working environment, moving from his Prague studio in Karmelitská Street to the garden of his wife's parents in Frýdlant, in rural Bohemia. Here, he created the abstract sculpture Labyrinth, which represents the beginning of the next stage of his work. This new stage is also documented by the above-mentioned twin crystals, the Untitled. These works, however, do not represent purely geometric experiments but rather combinations of the figurative and the abstract. The sculptor is fascinated by the mutual permeating geometric forms and by their organic growth in the body of a sculpture which thus becomes the proof of the affinity between the natural and artificial worlds, and thus also the world of the arts.
On 18 March 1992, Michal Gabriel exhibited his "abstract" sculptures in the Prague MXM gallery. The quotation marks suggest that these works were no more abstract than for example the laminate Body from 1988 (which was to be followed by the bronze sculpture entitled 13 six years later). These works thus represented milestones on the artist's journey to the basics of plasticity, based on mathematic and geometrical symbols - works that combined the rational with playfulness, and playfulness with wit.
Part of the public, but also part of the art world, did not consider these abstracting principles and the logics of the work - which aimed at a synthesis - to be communicative enough. Michal Gabriel perceived this distance as a stimulus to return to a dialogue: he changed the subject and used alphabets in his following works; alphabets which are the basis of communication. The bronze And there Was Light from 1993 marks at the beginning of this experiment. Letters and words of the Biblical statement, however, disappear in some kind of metal eruptive rock and the work is anything but an illustration of the Old Testament's Genesis. The quotation is illegible; the communication is therefore again made at least difficult. In one of his texts, Gabriel returns to this problem: "I began with simple geometric solid bodies, but because the sculptures ceased to communicate, they were later substituted by signs of alphabets composed into semantic druses of words." This was a certain decline from the figurative that is "legible" in an overly traditional way. "I also became interested in script which stands out from the material - unlike other shapes and forms, it has totally unambiguous meaning. [...] The geometry of body was replaced by a certain kind of calligraphy."
These described experiments with alphabets and words were subsequently halted for some time; for Gabriel became convinced that the formal aspect of the work, although not communicative enough, prevailed. Therefore there are subjects - or rather tendencies - in Gabriel's work that are closed for a certain period. But they are never abandoned permanently.
STORIES OF FIGURES
Looking at the whole bulk of Michal Gabriel's work, an art critic and author feels the need to classify it. The critic would, for example, like to write a chapter about its purely experimental tendency. However, he soon finds out that the experiment is a general (or rather omnipresent) aspect of Gabriel's work, as is his figurativeness - which is the most usual term to label it. He thus has to search for a different way of how to grasp this whole - being aware that in the ideal case her text would be as coherent and united as the sculptor's work. In the best case, it could be seen as a story which never ceases to continue - for example as a story of figures. But such a story is not coherent and does not ensure the clarity of description.
We therefore have to recall the banal definition that figurative art is the opposite of abstract art. Under the term "figurative sculpture", we first imagine human figures, then portraits and finally figures of animals. But there is also the figurative aspect of objects. The given term thus includes all the phenomenal reality that can be rendered. It means there is the canonical colossus of "the figurative" on one hand, and the smaller, constantly changing space of "the abstract" on the other. Michal Gabriel differentiates in a similar way: "The left and right halves of the face of my work. I differentiate between the initial positions of the birth of a sculpture as the inward - the left, emotional, and the outward - the right, rational, conceptual."
In autumn 1998, Gabriel began to lecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Technical University in Brno where he was appointed the head of the studio of figural sculpture. There, he felt a certain limitation - especially because he has been utterly uninterested in figure for some stages of his work.
However, the fact is that Gabriel's work is figurative from the very beginning. In part, it is also "autobiographical", and this is so from the moment when the stories of Gabriel's sculptures began to correspond to the stories of his personal life. From the times of the Egyptian Woman, made of ash-tree wood in 1986, the artist created possibly twenty sculptures that can be called a family cycle or a "family myth". But this early tendency of Gabriel's work did not end with the Egyptian Woman - it continued with other female figures, the last one being the coloured sculpture Hair from 2002.
We therefore have to mention the main participants in Gabriel's family cycle - his wife, the great painter Milada Gabrielová, and his children, daughter Marie and sons Michael and Martin.
Three children climb up the spiral on the bronze sculpture Journey from 1990. Each of them then becomes an individual creator of some later works. However, the very first one was The Madonna from 1988. The artist says: "I cut The Madonna when my daughter Marie was born; the baby's body in the arms of the figure is painted over with the ornament from Mariánka's baby tights." The sculpture can be also understood as the interpretation of one of the central motifs of the Christian iconography. The face of The Madonna (similarly as in the case of some other sculptures) lacks the detailed character of a portrait. This fact may prove the "philosophy" of ambiguousness. But the problem was purely sculptural: the originally wooden face - formed, in the artist's words, by "two arches like in architecture" - had to be replaced with a bronze one.
The sculpture St Christopher from 1994, again made of ash-tree wood, has a similar story. In it, the artist also applied subject from the Christian iconography, moreover "doubled" by the scene of family life; here, too, the faces were initially different - coloured by white that Gabriel later removed and "enlarged the eyes, so the father and the child have them equally big".
Gabriel's self-portrait can be identified in various male figures he created, but most often in the sculpture Buddha from 1993. To metamorphose oneself into the work and to lend one's face to his or her figures is undoubtedly one of the most frequently used privileges of the artist.
Also figural are sculptures from 1988, Foreigner and Copying Clerk. But already in the following sculpture of the same period, entitled Body, the figure is geometrically abstracted and the original intention of the Foreigner ("to connect elementary geometric solid bodies, composed of cylinders") is here taken to its furthest extreme. Yet more examples of geometrization are the "Cubist" sculptures from 1990. In some sculptures - for example in the series of symbols and signs from 1989 and in the Tree Trunk from 1993 - the human figure is conceived as a tree. In the case of the Tree Trunk, the sculptor, casting the work into laminate, first used nutshells on the entire surface of the object, thus creating a new structural whole. The same method was applied in 1994 in the laminate sculpture Rest. The woman figure, seated in a yoga position, represents a totally physically and mentally concentrated body; the viewer realizes only later that it is at the same time a nude. In this context, it is important to note that Gabriel never works with the genre of the nude - so popular in the arts and repeated to banality and dumbness in the field of sculpture. Nevertheless, this does not mean that his work avoids eroticism. Eroticism is there, both latent and explicit, but never in the lascivious, "tabloid" form.
Each Gabriel's sculpture has its own story. Some figures are, however, part of larger wholes and more general events - as is for example the case of the Old Theme from 2000, Story from the same year and Pack of Hounds from 2003. The Story deals with the ancient subject "human and animals". The man is naked, but not defenceless, holding some kind of primitive tools in his hands. The beast of prey is a beautiful wonder of Nature, but only in our human eyes; in Nature, categories as beauty and truth are non-existent. The skin - the design of these figures - has the structure of nuts, it is perforated in some figures, in others smooth and in yet another corrugated. It thus represents a very characteristic feature of Gabriel's work; it can be even said that it is determining. This tendency reaches its climax in the figures of Players and Cyclots from the recent years of Gabriel's artistic career. They represent the synthesis of a "realistic" figure whose limbs are prolonged either to the ground as symbols of stability and strength, or that continue as wheels of a journey, an infinite route whose end is unknown to us. It is like a neverending story in whose centre stands both the figure and its creator.
FRAGMENTARY REFLECTION
Life in contemporary society - which sets such a great store on the most modern technical achievements - is on one hand increasingly interconnected by mechanisms that enable us to cross any boundaries and continents in a split second (so as everybody has the theoretical possibility to connect with the antipodes both through image and sound). But on the other hand, this destroys the integrity of life - life breaks up to fragments. Thus, there disappears the possibility to contemplate and to meditate for a whole day, or only to dream about a single idea of a work. The daily rhythm turns more and more hectically, there is no doubt about it.
How does this influence art, and especially the field of sculpture? The latter should certainly react to this increasingly intensive dispersion and acceleration that does not ensure smooth development. But how should it react? For sculpture is rather a slow medium, and as concerns materials, it works in the "discipline of eternity". A sculpture as an artwork, however, should not be solely a cluster of fragments to be decomposed to individual parts due to unfavourable time or weather conditions - after all, nothing worse can happen to a sculptor than such a decomposition of his work.
Michal Gabriel lays special emphasis on the integrity, entirety and durability of his sculptures. One entire line of his work was created on the basis of the work of watchful eyes sensitively recording a new form. Fantasy, the vision of a work, used a fragment, or rather a quotation; it worked with a part detached from somewhere else, connected to another fragment and transferred to the new unity of a sculpture that exceeds the boundaries of the traditional genre. It is the cast, or the work made of a single wooden tree trunk. Nothing glued together, nothing screwed together! On the other hand, there is a smaller series of works which attempted to abandon the vicious circle of working in one material in favour of emphasizing heterogeneity: they were based on the connection of plastics with natural materials, on a certain contrapose. This group includes the plexiglass boxes with their assemblages from early 1991, and sculptures combining wood and plexiglass from the same period. It is an example of the connection of traditional with avant-garde thinking - crafts with unconventional methods and elements.
Michal Gabriel rejects everything what seems to be too "artistic" (not to mention "The Arts") - he rejects any "struggle with the material", so fondly eulogized by some writers. Thus - no to scratches, cuts, breaks and nicks; no to the aestheticizing of the annual growth rings of wood or the welding seams of metal. Just the contrary: work that departs from the elements of plasticity and - as part of a whole - is rather inconspicuous in its artificial character (remembering that artificiality is the fundamental principle of the arts). For it seems that there is something unhealthy in a system where the arts do not represent a natural part of the whole but concentrate - almost by warning "Watch, this is Beauty!" - exclusively on certain places and a selected audience.
JUNGLE AS A SCULPTURAL MONUMENT
It is said about artists in general, and about sculptors especially, that they are capable of creating new worlds. The sculptural-architectonic project of the "Indonesian jungle" for the Zoo in the Prague Trója district - realized by three artists, Michal Gabriel, Lukáš Rittstein and Barbora Šlapetová from the beginning of 2003 - is grandiose and totally unique. To create scores of trees and lianas and hundreds of square metres of rocks and artificial spaces for animals is undoubtedly unprecedented in the history of contemporary art. Is it a monument? Applied art in its most genuine form?
It seems that we would not find a better example of the fusion of the artificial with the artistic, and, accompanied by natural elements, the creation of a whole. It is at the same time an example of a work of art that primarily serves varans, macaques and orang-outangs, and only then the human visitors.
People like to claim that art does not have to serve - partly from principle and partly because art somewhat rules and controls those who become mesmerized by its beauty. That might be true, but in this artificial jungle, scarcely anybody would search for the signature of those who created it. The work as a whole undoubtedly forms a series of sculptures, and thus is art, but it represents completely applied art - contrary to Gabriel's chair created as a sculpture. The chair is thus first of all an object d'art, and only secondarily a piece of useful and functional furniture. The artistic jungle is therefore a set of sculptures that will help the endangered animals of the world to survive. It is a set that is functional - a fact which will be appreciated by the animals - and at the same time it is a perfectly veristic work - a fact to be appreciated by the visitors who can otherwise only hardly discern an artificial tree branch from the natural one. This magnificent work of art shall be set into operation and filled with fauna and visitors in Autumn 2004.
THERE ARE WORKS...
There are works that are at first glance varied, but which fall apart and dissolve in particularity, and there are works which - as is the case of Michal Gabriel - fall into wholes. The total bulk of Michal Gabriel's work appears as a whole not only to the art historians, but mainly to the viewers; it is a new world which lacks neither animals and plants nor human beings, and also trees and rocks, landscapes and still-lifes. It is a world of the divine quality - creativity - which may know its limits, but constantly exceeds them. It is a cosmos of work that may be predestined by great talents, but which begins with its own somewhat irrational logic of discoveries, by the paradox of departing from complex things and arriving at simplicity. It is a universe, a universality in its own right.
JIŘÍ OLIČ