Ex libris review in Chrudim 1983,11 Biennial of small graphic works in St. Niklaas, Belgium, honourable mention on Concorso exlibris Lago Maggiore 1994, Exlibris Prostejov 2000 honourable mention.

Prepared independent exhibition on the Czech Republic and abroad-for instance Konstanz, Deggersdorf-Germany, Ried, Steyer-Ausfria, Mondorf-Luxemburg, Otawa-Canada, Lucerne-Switzerland etc.

MEMBERSHIP

Union of creative artists. New association of Prague Artists, Association of free graphic artists, Hollar.

REPRESENTATION IN COLLECTIONS

National gallery Prague, Alsova jihoceska galerie, Muzeum exlibris Chrudim, museums in Dennmark, Italy, France, Belgium, etc.

F1GURAL GRAPHIC IN INTERIORS

RM system Tabor, Pisek, Pelhrimov, Hotel Slovan Tabor, Maxim - Plana nad Luznici, Czech Trade Bank Strakonice

ILLUSTRATIONS

Poetry, prose, travelogues.

Marie Michaela Sechtlova only apparently interrupted the line of three generations of South Bohemian photographers. She returns again and again to the legacy of her great-grandfather Ignac and his son. She admires the liveliness and action of their pictures, taken at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Her father influenced her with the daring to make experiments, her mother gave her lyri¬cism. She learnt to notice detail and recognise its importance. She found and finds the poetry and soft lines of the South Bohemian countryside and the balance between nature and man.

Where are the roots of M. M. Sechtlova's work, what are its characteristic features? A deep union with nature, knowledge of the relationship of life to flowing time, recognition of the unique quality of the moment, that must be caught, so that one can search for and find belief in love, truth, in man, whose beauty is in the true, unfalsified richness of his inner being.

JIRI DEMEL

On looking at the work of Maria Michaela Sechtlova we realise that the lightness there is not isolated, but is connected with another side of our being, and that is just with the weight, the material character, lastingness and pressure, if not oppression of reality. If we look at Maria Michaela Sechtlova's cycles from this point of view - Masks, Pierot and Balet - we find that just this dialectical weight and lightness is common to all who to sing in his cloudy white robe, with his movements, gestures and mimicry, his dream of the sovereignty of longing, but we also know how heavily he falls back, he collapses crushed by disappointment, cloaked in the shadow of hopeless melancholy. The freer the movement of bodies in space, the more we realise the vanity of the eternal human longing to overcome all that is given, that crushes man and drags him back.

PhDr. JAN KRIZ

Marie Michaela Sechtlova is most herself in the technique mezzotint, which she ressurected from be-ing forgotten and raised to a high artistic level. She also gave it a special magie by very gently covering the pallet with local colours. This is a technique that is most exacting in both time and patience, a tech¬nique requiring considerable imagination, as the work really advances in the opposite direefion. The lights are seraped out on hand-grained board. But boards treated with this technique can stand only about a hundred pressures. And so these mezzotints are used exciusively for the prints of bibiiophiles, who appreciate and admire their exceptional qualities.

Dr. KAREL SAMSlNAK

Repeated elements and forms appear in the graphic pages of M. M. Sechtlova's individual cycies in the most various selections and circumstances. This repetition is rather reminiscent of musical variations, the author this spontaneously draws the on-looker's attention to all their possible relationships in the number of symbois chosen, to the variability of the symboiic possibilities of each element and the relativity of the symboiic possibilities of each element and the relativity of their actual and symboiic existence. But directly she finds a poetic expression for each repeated element, untroducting an emotive feeling as a key to the on-looker's understanding, but that does not go as far as thoughtful understanding.

PhDr. VLASTIMIL TETIVA

Pidures of trees, in their bent trunks and broken branches, have written the traces of cruel winters and unexpected storms. But in the laws of frequently merciless nature the painter does not notice evil, but just a dosed circle of the story of birth, growth, ripening and decay. And Just that humility and agree-ment with the unchanging order can be clearly read in the work of Marie Michaela Sechtlova.

JARA NOVOTNY

From catalogue M-M-S/g-m-k (Marie Michaela Sechtlova - grafika, malba, kresba)

More on Marie Michaela Sechtlova web pages.

MaG