Czech Embassyart events draw to close

Fragile Harmony, a striking exhibition by Czech artist Zdena Rafka Reháková opened at the Czech Embassy in Beijing on Friday, concluding the embassy's two-year cycle of Embassyart events.

The 43 pieces displayed, on tapestries, canvas and paper cover the fashion-designer-turned-painter's works from the late 1980s to 2011 including her major series Capita Picta, Angel and Wedding Day, which portrayed intimate moments between other couples that attended her wedding in 2003.

In the Capita Picta series, created between the early and mid-2000s, the 59-year-old artist focused on human heads from an abstract and sometimes graphic perspective.

"I have been looking for harmony all the time, in my life and on the earth we live," said Reháková. "But harmony can easily be breached and might disappear all of a sudden. As we go on living our everyday lives we need to find a balance, which is not easy."

Capita Picta is the artist's struggle for harmony. Images of people or animals are merged together almost indefinably so, symbolizing the external and internal relationships between beings, the process of forming ideas, the search for harmony and an interaction with one's milieu.

In the Angle series, the artist has worked with images of smaller creatures, showing them protecting humans and leading them into safe places or away from danger.

"Reháková attempts to fasten, anchor and stabilize the lens of her perception, to find certainty in an unsteady environment," said Libor Secka Czech Ambassador to China. "Colors are a means of balancing. Reháková is an artist that amply uses different materials and techniques to express her thoughts, to capture the uniqueness of a moment. However, at the same time she is an artist who recasts lyrics into visual sensations."