To depict and capture a moment of time…

To depict and capture a moment of time…

Dana Doricová

Academic sculptor Anna Horváthová (1953, Prague) studied ceramics at the secondary school of ceramics in the town of Bechyně (1968 – 1972). She graduated from the forming studio of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (1973 – 1980). She is a noted ceramic maker and a publicly active person. She has presented her works at 13 special exhibitions, at dozens collective exhibitions and attended 14 symposium, both at home and abroad. She was awarded the Slovak Union of Visual Arts Prize in 2007. She is also active in drawing and painting and as a teacher at an elementary art school.

She began her career as a visual artist by making drawings. She made black-and-white linear drawings with shaded areas by pen and ink. Her drawings depicted mystic objects or closed areas and predicted the career of a young sculptor. In fact, they are bodies, architectures and sculptures. The artist keeps making drawings as her “therapy” and making clay objects as pure joy. A new creative period started at the turn of 1980s and 1990s when A. Horváthová added colours into her work. Her first ceramic objects were without colours; they were patterned by fire or she used the polychrome technique. She used colours in her collections called The Trap, The Figure and The Box.

She replaced existentialist figures and mythical objects with personal mythology she called her diaries, collections or individual archaeology. Then she returned to the symbolic abstract sculptures (The Shelves, The Footprints) once again. Her later works depict harmonic and peaceful countryside. Sculptures, collections and diaries refer to her sense of humour, grotesquery and poetry. Symposiums play an important part of her creative life. A. Horváthová is an active supporter of ceramic symposiums. On the other hand, symposiums are very important, personally, for her: „…I would not have done ceramic art without symposiums. I do not have necessary equipment, cannot work in a small place and make small things.“

A. Horváthová was awarded the Slovak Union of Visual Arts Prize for her artwork Poiplie (2004) in 2008.

ÚĽUV