Biografie

Jaroslava Bičovská, born on 12 August 1945 in Brandýs nad Labem.

From the beginning, Jaroslava Bičovská was inclined towards graphics and drawing. She started at the Vyšehrad publishing house, first as an administrative worker and later as a technical and art editor. Here she started illustrating her first books. Then, of course, she got married, lived in Brandýs nad Labem, devoted herself to maternal duties and suddenly lost all contact with Prague and the artistic scene. After maternity leave, she couldn't find a job for a long time, until finally she started inventing and drawing very successful children's comics for the magazine Naše rodina.

Over the years, her interest turned more and more to free painting. In 1976, she built a small studio and decided to leave comics and devote herself fully to painting. However, the graduate of the graphic arts school taught herself that, so no one made it easy for her to take the first steps in learning a new technique. She considers David Hockney and Hans Hartung as her role models, whose paintings are conceived on a line, which is very close to her – an essential draftsman.

Already the first figural paintings from the eighties of the last century, with a very dark tone, depicting mainly the figures of musicians and comedians, revealed the strange dream world of Jaroslava Bičovska, oscillating between realism and abstraction. Almost hyper-realistically presented figures float in an abstract environment, trembling with the impressions resulting from their activity. In the painting Jamsession from 1989, the music surrounding the depicted musicians is almost palpable.

In the nineties, the abstract lines in Bičovska's paintings took on a stronger breath, but the captivating atmosphere of the works remained. Musical motifs remained (Unisono, Da capo, Silensio, Solo...) because thanks to her pianist mother, music is very strongly rooted in Bičovská. In addition, the themes of action, movement and transformation (Dawning, Apparition, Sign, Evening...) appeared.

At that time, the hitherto inaccessible world beyond the borders also began to open up to Bičovská. She got before the revolution thanks to her marriage to dr. By Charif Bahbouh, CSc., originally Syrian, "only" to the Arab world - Syria, Lebanon and Algeria. The culture there got under her skin, especially calligraphy, which was very close to her (Record of a beautiful day, Visit to Damascus...). In 1990, she and her husband founded the Dar Ibn Rushd publishing house, focused on publishing publications from the Arab world. Jaroslava Bičovská edited most of the books typographically and designed the covers, and illustrated many of them.

When drawing, he uses a special technique, where he first carves the drawings into the paper, and only then reaches for the pencil and colors. The line seems too concrete to her, and engraving resists absolute realism.

After 2000, the color palette changes, perhaps partly thanks to the safe mastery of painting technique, Bičovská chooses bright, even bright colors. The new work is represented by small watercolors and canvases, which after a purely abstract period return to the boundary between abstraction and reality. They exude an unadulterated joy of living, of seeing the beauty around them, and painterly certainty. In them, Bičovská captures everything that is close to her – the landscape around the river in Brandýs nad Labem, the castle park or her own garden.

In 2014, six black-and-white drawings appeared at the exhibition in the New Hall, which took everyone's breath away with their sovereignty and lightness. This new and yet old familiar string of Bičovská slowly grew and grew stronger, then with great force left the surface of the paper and was transferred to the canvas, resonating so strongly that it played out the entire exhibition black-and-white fugue at the Gema Gallery in 2017.

Since 2015, the director David Vigner has been following the author's life with his camera. In the film "Quiet Water", he managed to capture, in addition to the author's life story, several key exhibitions of Bičovská, starting with the exhibition in the Strahov Monastery in Prague in 2015 and the above-mentioned black and white exhibition it ends in the Gema Gallery. In Czech, there is a saying "Quiet water washes the banks", pointing to the powerful power of a thin trickle of water, which is able to wash the banks. And Bičovská is truly such a quiet person, always willing to work for others, support her sons, work for her husband's publishing house, illustrate her son's books and work on her free work in her spare time, grasp painting techniques herself and develop her specific painting style without being guided by anyone . Surprisingly for many, a powerful painterly source of unprecedented vivacity and strength has sprung up from the originally graphic source in recent years.