Padrtová Ludmila - Krajinou k abstrakci – Primus Zdenek (2020)

This Czech-language art book examines Ludmila Padrtová (1931–2016), who created abstract compositions from the mid-1950s yet remained hidden from public attention then and little known even today. Together with Vladimír Boudník, she was among the first artists in Czechoslovakia to pursue abstraction, at a time when it was forbidden to create and especially to exhibit such work. In abstraction, she was then more mature than Boudník, but as a woman she was overlooked by male artists, critics and even friends, while she herself did not try to promote her work. Her inspiration came from nature, leading her to work with colour, which young artists of the period rejected. Today she is one of the most distinctive artists of her generation, although she remains known mainly to audiences who understand and admire abstract art. Padrtová devoted herself to art in the 1950s and then only during the few years before her death, in the first half of the 2010s. One exception is her colour photography of nature from the 1980s: although its subjects remain recognisable as motifs from nature, the images are conceived, intentionally or otherwise, as abstract compositions. The book publishes these photographs on this scale for the first time, together with her drawings, collages and paintings from her final years. Her works on paper from the 1950s are known from an earlier publication on which Zdenek Primus, the author of this book, also collaborated. The book accompanies her major exhibitions in Karlovy Vary, Kolín and České Budějovice, presenting Padrtová as an artist with the potential to become a permanent figure in the canon of post-war classical modernism in Czech art.