Margita Titlová Ylovsky (*1957) is one of the most distinctive figures on the Czech art scene. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, she became a prominent representative of the underground artistic generation in the 1980s. She distanced herself from the official normalizing art of the time and chose a solitary path, reflecting on actionism, conceptualism, land art, body art and performance – as evidenced, for example, by her action series Vymezení prostoru (1980) or Dotyky se stínem (Touches with Shadow ).
Some of the artist's works are represented in the private collection of Telegraph founder Robert Runták. She was prominently featured in the collective exhibition Connection (2023–2024) and was also part of the exhibition Signal IV . These exhibitions were followed by the films produced by Telegraph Gallery Connection: Creating the Unspeakable (2024) and Signal from the Eighties (2026), in which the artist appears. In March 2024, presentation and lecture by the artist were also held at Telegraph.
The Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava (GVUO) is currently presenting the artist's work as part of the exhibition At the Turn of the Millennia , where the ongoing exhibition is part of the series Exhibition of One Work from the GVUO Collection. The project At the Turn of the Millennia maps the forms of visual art by artists who entered the art scene at the turn of the millennium. This concept presents the gallery collection as a living organism in the period before the construction of the new extension to the House of Arts and at the same time serves as a generator of the gallery's new graphic face - the selected artwork is the basis for the color scale used on programs and printed materials.
The curators of these intimate exhibitions are personalities from the fields of literature, fine arts, theater, architecture, science, music, or restoration who are not primarily concerned with art history, thus bringing a new and fresh perspective to the gallery. These personalities themselves select the exhibited works from the gallery's collection. The thirty-third continuation of the cycle was curated by singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist David Pomahač, who selected the painting Loves of Dolls from the collection.
The exhibited painting comes from the cycle of the same name Loves of Dolls (first presented in 1992). This cycle marked a return to traditional expressive methods of drawing and painting in the work of Margita Titlová Ylovsky, but with a significant departure from the usual work with specific objects. Classical painting is replaced by action methods - fingerprints and finger strokes. Through them, the artist resorted to pure imagination and to capturing the themes of human emotions, inner feelings, love and hate.
The key element is the color symbolism, where red represents love, multicolor represents disharmony, and gray-black tones refer to extreme life situations. The cycle also included eight artist's books installed vertically on the wall and dolls formed on canvases into specific communication compositions. This presentation fits into the life-long direction of the artist's, who has long experimented with non-traditional techniques exploring unconscious sources of the psyche and physical phenomena, which is also evidenced by her well-known cycle Drawings in the Dark (2011) from the Prague club ROXY.
The artist's work can be seen at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava (GVUO) from September 30, 2026 to January 3, 2027. The exhibition is held under the auspices of Peter Harvánek, Councilor for Culture and Monument Preservation of the Moravian-Silesian Region.
