CGD

Olšáková's new jewellery collection, Into the Pink, is her peculiar interpretation of architecture by the world-famous Ricardo Bofill. More precisely, its source of inspiration was La Muralla Roja, a housing complex on the coastline of the Catalonian city of Calpe, completed in 1973 and exemplifying critical Modernism and post-Modernism in architecture encyclopedias. Karla, in her own way, transferred its elementary forms, dramatic verticality, rich articulation and atypical color scale to her collection of wooden jewels.

The first three brooches originated for the Neumannka gallery in the city of Prachatice, where the artist held an exhibition with the group UNOSTO in spring 2018. She originally planned to develop the collection in blue color, which also belongs to the architectural complex but, during the preparatory works for Designblok, she and Rudolf Rusňák eventually decided to just dip their stand in blue and exclusively reserve pink for the jewels. Besides brooches, the collection includes earrings, with some of their variants again enriched with a kinetic element. For example, one of the brooches has a piece of wood suspended on a string, and thus reacts on every movement, while another one employs transparent PVC foil which forms an inconspicuous moving joint, and the piece thus offers two positions.

"When I first saw the La Muralla Roja complex about a year ago at Instagram, it left me totally astonished. I have collected a lot of information about the construction since and finally resolved to transfer some of its principles into my jewellery. I have been working with geometry and wood on a long-term basis. The previous collections laid emphasis on the natural color scale of either exotic wood or veneer, but here, I embarked on colors like this for the first time and I enjoyed it a lot! I am now tempted to extend the collection with more colorful pieces," the artist comments.

Danica Kovářová