Jana Želibská

Jana Želibská belonged to the progressive generation of action and conceptual artists who entered the Czechoslovak art scene in the 1960's. In her early works she rethought the inspiration of international tendencies, in particular pop-art and French New Realism. In 1973 the theorist Pierre Restany (1930-2003) wrote a catalogue for her separate exhibition Chuť ráje v Paříži / The Taste of Paradise in Paris, in which he aptly called Jana Želibská the "eternal fiancée of spring." Želibská really was at the birth of environment and object in the 1960's, action and concept in the 1970's, postmodern object and installation in the late 1980's, and video art in the 1990's. She was the only one of her generation who openly dealt with intimate relationships between men and women, and ”celebrated“ the female body from the (proto-) feminist perspective.