Independent 20th Century
For Independent 20th Century, a selection of Magdalena Jetelová's (b. 1946) historical interventions is presented as a series of light boxes. The photographs that once served as records of temporary interventions become luminous objects themselves. Light is no longer simply depicted; it once again occupies the exhibition space as an active material. In doing so, the works recover something of the physical immediacy that defined the original interventions while allowing them to enter into dialogue with the present.
Throughout her career, Magdalena Jetelová has sought to make visible what ordinarily remains beyond perception. Geological fault lines, architectural systems, historical symbols, and invisible forces become momentarily perceptible through interventions of light. Rather than imposing form upon the world, her works reveal structures that already exist—structures that shape landscapes, define boundaries, and organize space long before they become visible to the human eye.
Developed between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the works presented at Independent 20th Century belong to a pivotal moment within Jetelová's practice. During these years, sculpture gradually expanded beyond its traditional material limits. Monumental forms dissolved into lines of light; architecture opened onto landscape; the autonomous object gave way to temporary interventions unfolding across mountains, water, and geological formations. Sculpture was no longer understood as something occupying space, but as something capable of revealing the invisible conditions from which space itself emerges.
This transformation did not represent a departure from Jetelová's earlier work. Having first established herself through monumental wooden sculptures during the 1970s and 1980s, she had long been concerned with architecture as both a physical and psychological structure. Chairs, staircases, tables, and houses—carved from massive oak trunks and enlarged beyond human scale— appeared simultaneously familiar and estranged. These sculptures did not simply occupy space; they altered the viewer's relationship to it. Even before light entered her practice, Jetelová was already questioning how form constructs experience and how sculpture might extend beyond the object itself.
The works brought together here mark the moment in which these questions found an increasingly immaterial language. Rather than shaping matter, Jetelová began shaping perception. Light became neither an effect nor a means of illumination, but a sculptural material capable of articulating relationships otherwise impossible to perceive.
