Magdalena Jetelová

Magdalena Jetelová (1946) is one of the most significant figures in contemporary European art, whose environmental and spatial interventions open new ways of thinking about landscape, politics, and memory. From the outset of her career, she has engaged with scale and spatial articulation, consistently pushing beyond the traditional boundaries of sculpture and expanding its field toward architecture, landscape, and conceptual strategies.

After emigrating to Germany, Jetelová began developing site-specific projects that respond to the character of a given location – its historical layers as well as its geopolitical context. Her large-scale landscape interventions, often employing fire, smoke, light, or laser projections, belong among the most distinctive contributions to European land art. These luminous drawings connect the specificity of chosen sites with textual fragments that articulate broader social, environmental, and existential questions. Ephemerality and temporality are fundamental to Jetelová’s practice; most of these works now persist primarily through photographic documentation.

Working with natural elements forms a continuous thread throughout her oeuvre. Experiments conducted around her studio in the Šárka Valley – sending out smoke signals and subsequently obscuring them – led to the creation of her first smoke drawings. She later expanded this approach in a series of pyrotechnic drawings, using heat and controlled explosions to generate image structures that evoke natural processes, geological formations, or energetic lines shaping the landscape. Throughout her career, Jetelová has repeatedly returned to themes of interaction, shifts in time and space, and scale, choosing materials defined by their instability, ephemerality, or transformative nature.

Magdalena Jetelová studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She served as a professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989 to 2004 and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 2004 to 2011. Her international reputation has been reinforced through presentations at numerous major exhibitions and institutions, including Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Documenta 8 in Kassel.