Inge Kosková

If anyone was wondering whether the specific spirit of Olomouc has consequences for the work of visual artists living there, they would almost at first sight come across a tendency to intellectually-conditioned creations manifested, among other phenomena, in intensive drawing production. Besides the black and white cross-hatched, large-format “sufferings” by Václav Stratil from the 1980s, Inge Kosková’s drawings have clamorously found their place in the context of Czech visual art of the past four decades. Originally from Brno, where she was born on January 31, 1940, Inge Kosková has since 1957 lived in Olomouc. There she studied mathematics and descriptive geometry at the Faculty of Science of the Palacký University where she also gradated from the art theory and education programme. After graduation, she stayed at the faculty as a lecturer (1961 – 1964); via a teaching position at an elementary school in Šternberk (1964 – 1965), a secondary pedagogical school in Přerov (1965 – 1975), the Moravian Print Shop where she worked as a graphic designer (1975 – 1987) and an elementary art school in Olomouc (1987 – 2000), she returned to Olomouc academic environment at the arts education department of the pedagogical faculty (2004 – 2006). Her jobs left her enough room for her quiet and highly personal work which was described by the “conceptualist” curator Jiří Valoch as “perhaps inconspicuous at first sight and seemingly visually unattractive but very consistently loyal to the Olomouc school of drawing. She managed to create something unique, exceeding the limits of tie and space and representing a unique transformation of a free yet precisely delimited examination of drawing as a medium”.

ingekoskova@seznam.cz

Martin Dostál

Untitled I – IV
Drawing on paper, ink, 4 pcs 21 x 29.5 cm; 2011