The exhibition space Behind the Wall, which is part of the permanent exhibition 20th-Century Czech Art and Its Labels, is dedicated to artists who in 1948–1989 worked outside official structures of cultural policy – either on the underground scene or in the grey area overlooked by official institutions. They often created experimental works, action art, happenings or other intangible or temporary installations. Seen from today’s perspective, these works – created and shown “behind the walls” of studios, homes or weekend cottages – are some of the conceptually richest artistic documents of that era.
The art of ERIKA PFEIFFEROVÁ (b. 1956) straddles the line between drawing, painting and relief structure. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1976–1982, where she studied monumental painting under Jan Smetana (1918–1998). Over time, her work came to reflect her interest in the composition of the image, the material and surface of the painting, and the relationships that can arise between line, surface and space.
The exhibition includes several of Pfeifferová’s works from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her paintings Lights, Gate, Lake I, Lake II and In Yellow were made during a time that she associates with the search for a new foundation and with the question of what can be retained from past experience. Her thinking at the time related to the concept of a ground plan, of architecture and interior light. This motif took on an introspective meaning, for it described the inner space within a person, a place where one could try to find “a point from which to continue on.”
Pfeifferová formulated these ideas through a spatial and geometric composition whose basic articulation is defined and delineated by a ground plan. Boundaries, passages, surfaces and light create a structure whose individual elements are mutually interdependent. The geometric shapes’ apparent simplicity hints at the existence of complex and intricate interrelationships – a connection created by the artist herself. Geometry determines visual form without creating any single unambiguous interpretation.
The paintings were made on hardboard. Looking back on her work from the 1980s, Pfeifferová emphasizes the solid nature of this material and the openness of its surface, which can be understood in relation to the possibilities that present themselves during the working process. She describes her approach as “collaborating with the surface”, a statement that shifts the focus away from the material itself and onto her relationship to it and to the process of making the painting.
One important component of these paintings is light, which enters their construction as a variable element that upsets the composition’s fixed arrangement. The exhibition is accompanied by one of her later daily writings on the subject of silence, a theme that appears repeatedly in Pfeifferová’s work in relation to concentration and inner space.
In her nine-part cycle Bast Drawings from 1992, Pfeifferová developed her interest in line, surface and material by working with a different approach. Applying bast onto light-coloured handmade paper, she created lines that stand out from the surface of the image by forming a delicate relief structure. Exhibited alongside her paintings, they illustrate how she works with space through the use of geometric relationships and light, and how she shapes the space in her drawings by having the line stand out physically from the paper. The cycle was acquired by the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové in 2025, and today Pfeifferová’s works are a part of the gallery’s permanent exhibition.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.
