NEWS | 28. 6. 2017
Milena Valušková returns in a way to the “crime scene”. She first exhibited at the Theater of Music (now part of the Museum of Art) in 1973. This exhibition has already demonstrated her future direction, which has become a poetic-melancholic capture of nature. The current exhibition Milena Valušková Photograph 1971-2017 will present this Olomouc native in a wide range of her photographic work.
Milena Valušková passed through her life in all areas of photography. Since the late 1960s, she has been professionally involved in classical atelier photography, where she specializes in portraits of children in so-called communal atelier. In the seventies she had an irreplaceable experience at the Department of Forensic Medicine, she also worked with the Olomouc Medical Faculty to prepare study materials. In the eighties, she worked as a photographer in the Olomouc Center of State Monument Care and Nature Conservation. Her work extends from document to multi-layered landscape studies and technically complicated still-life.
A very large group in the profile of her work was always photographs of trees and shrubs. Its dominant means of expression was always light – the exterior photographs were created only with the effect of diffused daylight, another dull and illuminating process continued in the dark chamber. In the free and often unfinished photographic units he has created since the mid-1970s, he likes to use a comparative photogrammetry or overlapping of negatives. Landscapes have succeeded in highlighting a new layer, either light (work in a dark chamber) or geometric, rashes originating from accumulated natural resources (leaves, grasses, grooves).
“When Im in the landscape, its another dimension, it all falls off me. I always try to live the landscape in the place itself. I choose places according to literature, I am interested in the history of places, old events, cult places. But it also happened that I was attracted to some place, enchanted, and afterwards I searched for it, “Milena Valušková describes her work.
A great surprise is the work of Valušková in the area of the documentary. Since 1978, several photographic cycles have been created to capture the social marasmus of late normalization (First May, 1978, Prior, 1979, Homo Faber, 1980). However, Valušková did not pay attention to the document.
Catalog
The curator Štepánka Bieleszová wrote and organized a retrospective exhibition as well as the exhibition Milena Valušková: Photographs 1971 – 2017. On more than two hundred, especially the picture pages, she describes the development and professional career of Olomouc photographers.