Olina Franco

Olina Franco, whose real name is Olina Francová, is a Czech painter and sculptor. She grew up surrounded by art — her father was the academic painter, printmaker and sculptor Miroslav J. Černý, a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Education: 1977–1982 the Secondary School of Art on Hollarovo náměstí in Prague; 1983–1990 the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Ladislav Čepelák’s printmaking studio.

After graduating, her work moved from printmaking to enamel. She works with enamel on large-format iron sheets, with iron sculpture, with collage and assemblage (since 2020, under her own term “figurlage”). Thematically she concentrates on gender roles and stereotypes, women’s experience, the body and the tension between the inner and outer world; her work has a strong erotic charge and provocative moments full of humour and perspective.

Main cycles: Girls-Burks (two-metre iron figures taking up female stereotypes), Women — Eves (enamelled two-dimensional figures), Remarkable Czech Women (Czech women born in the 19th century), Shamans.

In the early 1990s she co-founded, with Magdalena Cubrová and Alexandra Horová, the first women’s art group Koza Nostra (1991–1995), which used irony and mischief to respond to the position of women, and not only in art. Together with Jitka Arazimová she runs the design studio FrancoArazzi (hand-sewn bags, social projects — adaptive clothing, caps for women after chemotherapy).

Exhibitions: more than 50 exhibitions are documented, among others in Prague, in Slovakia, Hungary, Japan and Colombia (a symposium in 2020); a solo exhibition at the Klatovy / Klenová Gallery.