The queen also visited her in Norway. In the Czech Republic, the artist was forgotten for decades

“I wanted to see from the outside where Czechoslovakia is in Europe. And you can’t see that when you’re sitting in it,” explained the graphic artist Zdenka Rusová, why she went out into the world for the first time. In 1970, she emigrated to Norway, where she became the first professor of graphics and the first woman to hold the position of rector of a high art school in Scandinavia. He still lives there today. He is currently exhibiting in Prague.

The show in the three halls of the Prague Museo Kamp stable, which will last until June 2, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Russian works in the Czech Republic after 57 years. It mainly includes her graphics and drawings from the 1960s, when she often depicted female heads and circus motifs. Instead of people, her scenes featured, for example, trained dogs in acrobatic positions.

The Norwegian stage of Rusové’s work is characterized by greater color, the masculine and feminine principles enter the works.

“I wanted to get away from Bohemia, from Central Europe. And where? To the north. I didn’t see any pictures, I only knew Munch. Quiet, cold, few people, nature, the sea,” says the eighty-four-year-old Russian exhibition curator Martina Vítková in an interview today , which is reprinted in the catalog.

Rusová was born in Prague in 1939, she has been drawing since she was a child. She graduated from UMPRUM in the studio of book graphics of Antonín Strnadel. She had only two independent exhibitions in the Czech Republic, the last one in 1967 at the Energy Club. That same year, she went to Norway for an internship for the first time. “I didn’t want to spend my whole life in that room and that country where I was born,” she explained why she wanted to see the world.

In 1970, she returned to Norway permanently. “I only had a summer dress and a bag with all the papers from birth. I got a place and a room with a family in Sandvik, which is about 15 kilometers from Oslo. I washed the floors and prepared the exhibition,” recalls Rusová, how she learned Norwegian with difficulty and she fit into society. “I went through everything alone. And female. And young,” she emphasizes.

Zdenka Rusová obtained Norwegian citizenship in 1974. | Photo: Museum Kampa

Since then, he has been exhibiting mainly in Scandinavia. To learn the language, she studied Bohemian Studies at the University of Oslo. She established close cooperation with the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, a collection-making institution that was established at the time, which over time acquired several hundred of her works.

Between 1987 and 1996, she was a professor of graphics at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts, where she was also rector until 1992. Today, her works are part of the collections of the National Museum in Oslo, the Tate Gallery or the British Museum in London. The catalog also mentions the fact that Sonja of Norway, who has been the queen of the Scandinavian country since 1991, visited Rusova at home. “She was even here twice. They have my paintings in the castle. Soňa also paints,” notes Zdenka Rusová.

When creating graphics, she most often works with drypoint and etching techniques, while drawing with ink and paper. A significant part of the exhibition consists of a series of heads from 1967 captured in profile, broken, laced. “They are always wounded women. You can see their necks torn, split, chopped. Furthermore, their heads look like growths, sometimes even resembling hills in the landscape. You can see the brokenness everywhere, as if she had to constantly fight for her femininity, identity, personality.” describes curator Vítková.

Important motifs for the graphic artist were balance, the search for balance, movement on a circus rope where there is always a risk of falling. “When I talked with Mrs. Rusová, she talked most often about freedom, about the position between a man and a woman, which she didn’t like very much in the Czech Republic, but found its application in Norway,” the curator mentions.

According to her, Rusová is an expressive speaker. He accompanies the words with hand gestures, facial expressions and laughter. She intersperses Czech, which she has not used regularly for more than fifty years, with Norwegian expressions and sentences. “Don’t be angry that the Czech language is Norwegian. Learn Norwegian. Come here for a visit and learn Norwegian, it’s not difficult,” she exhorts the curator in one part of the interview.

The picture from the exhibition of works by Zdenka Rusová shows an untitled ink drawing on paper from 2000. | Photo: CTK

According to her, Rusová particularly impressed Norway with the high level of craftsmanship and also with Central European themes. “According to the Russians, the landscape is a very important source for Norwegian colleagues, for Central Europeans that landscape is Kafka. The absurdity in which we live in Central Europe was also a source for the author,” adds Martina Vítková.

In an interview, the artist says that art is not only self-therapeutic, but also existential. “It is one of the grounds for existence,” he emphasizes. “I worked, I was a professor, I was a rector. I worked like a diva until I was seventy. At seventy, I said to myself: That’s it. From then on, I’m a pensioner and I don’t do anything. And I endured it and I don’t do anything,” she states Zdenka Rusová in the catalog.