The body is omnipresent in Jana Sterbak’s art – the elegant sweep of an arm’s arc, bodies suspended and contained, traces of bodies explored, and spaces created which might affect or contain bodies. Using materials as diverse as bronze, rubber, photography, video, cotton, glass, chocolate and meat, Sterbak displays a propensity for irreverence and a sense of the absurd, as well as a vision of the darker, more profound forces in human life.
Jana Sterbak (b. Prague, 1955) draws upon a tradition of Czech surrealism, humorous and iconoclastic, evident in both visual arts and literature. Arriving in Canada in 1968, Sterbak found the ideological opposite of the Marxist-Leninist government of Czechoslovakia, which strengthened her sense of ironic distance.
‘It was amusing’ she had said ‘ to watch the complete reversal of the values which were the foundation of my childhood’. Through this experience, Sterbak developed an acute sense of the conflict between dependency and self-determination. It is not surprising then, that the theme of constraint, imposed form within and without, should have become a major preoccupation in her work. The significance of the body in Sterbak’s work is thus often a political one, touching on the broadest issues of human freedom.
In Declaration 1994, two uncomfortable modernist chairs sit facing a television monitor. A ten minute video appears on the screen, of an ordinary man, dressed in a dark suit, reading aloud The Declaration of the Rights of Man. The recitation of this revolutionary tract is very purposeful – the reader is aphasic, he has a pronounced stutter. Some words are spoken with excruciating difficulty. Others are rushed over. The emotional confrontation of Declaration is on some ways autobiographical and contains a clear message central to Sterbak’s work – that of the inherent contradiction between the aspiration towards perfection and the inherent limitations of our nature.
In her examination of those stare between freedom and constraint, the subject of the body – not only physical, but psychic, sensual, moral – appears again and again. The body constrained by cages (Sisyphus II 1991) or clothes (Jacket 1992) or physically (Remote Control 1989 and Woman and Dogs (Defence) 1995) remains a preoccupation for Sterbak. Her complex, beautiful works explore desire and confinement, as well as physical and emotional liberation.
The exhibition was organised and co-produced by Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona and Le musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne in collaboration with the Serpentine.