Tereza Lochmann is a versatile artist. She works with large format woodcuts, as well as drawing and painting. Her most unusual activity, however, is printmaking. In her hands, this austere-looking medium takes on a contemporary twist that we can try to understand in the light of its ancestors.
Engraving has been used by three great artists in the history of art: Dürer in the 16th century used the burin to engrave wood. Rembrandt, in the 17th century, used etching and drypoint. Finally, in the 19th century, Goya made intense engravings with aquatint and sulphur. Tereza Lochmann follows in the footsteps of the earliest woodcuts, which came into being before any other. In contrast to Dürer, she does not use the chisel, but the “gouge” – a tool used to hollow out the wood – in order to spare the material. The chisel requires remarkable precision, both in gesture and line. Tereza Lochmann seems to put the uncontrollable, the letting go, at the heart of her artistic practice, and enjoys the results of these always new and unexpected experiments. She also takes the engraved medium and makes it her own: she exhibits the matrix, the negative of her works, as real sculptures. She combines her work with paint and the imprint of bicycle tyres, in search of life and depth. She also produces her works in single copies, which removes from engraving its original role of dissemination of the image. She makes it a single medium where it is intrinsically multiple.
However, her experiments encounter the same subjects and the same questions as those of her predecessors. Her work includes familiar motifs, such as the dogs in her work Canicula. The engraving is sharp and more than anything else conveys the movement of the star it represents. The swirling effect is induced by the many layers of ink spread over the paper. In her more recent work, her series How much more, based on human representations taken in the metro and combined with skeletons, renews the genre of the vanitas. Her paintings act as contemporary memento mori that one cannot help but compare to the emaciated bodies of Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Tereza Lochman’s art is situated in the strength of old-fashioned printmaking, without its legendary rigidity and lack of renewal. Her work renews this medium in order to honour the matrix, the artist’s hand in large format. She uses this narrative art that sculpts the figurative and the hybrid in a very contemporary abstraction to deal with current subjects. In the great tradition of Dürer, Goya and Doré, Tereza Lochmann shows the engraving of today.
