Jana Sterbak (Jana Štěrbáková) is a multidisciplinary artist of Czech origin.

Life and career

Sterbak earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University,. completing classes in film history with John Locke and Tom Waugh, as well as painting with Yves Gaucher

Guido Molinari Guido Molinari (October 12, 1933 – February 21, 2004) was a Canadian artist, known internationally for his serial abstract paintings. Biography Molinari was born in Montreal, Quebec to Italian heritage with his parents from Cune (Borgo a ...

. In the 1980s, she studied in art history at the University of Toronto and at New York University, ultimately abandoning her studies to dedicate herself to her artistic practice. In her artistic approach, performance is incorporated into her photography, film, and video installations. In the 1990s, Sterbak moved to Paris to teach at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts ( ENSBA). At age 36, a retrospective of her work was held at the

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (french: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the l ...

(1991) and subsequently shown at MIT in Boston and at the

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (or MCASD), in San Diego, California, US, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present. Mission The stated mission of ...

(1992). Her European career began in 1990 at Aperto, the international section of the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

, where co-curator

Bernard Blistène Bernard Blistène (born 1955) is a French art curator. From 2013 to 2021 he was the director of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne. Together with and Christine Macel, ArtReview ranked him the 21st in their annual ranking of the ...

chose to present her work. Several solo shows followed: in 1992, at the

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark, and has an extensive permanent collection of modern and cont ...

(Denmark) and at the MoMA New York, where one of her iconic installations, ''Sisyphus,'' was presented (this work then joined MAC Marseille's collection,) and in 1993 at La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona. ''Velleitas'', a solo exhibition curated by Corinne Diserens was presented in 1995 at the Musee d’art moderne of Saint-Étienne and at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, and at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1996. In the early 2000s, she produced two video installations. The first, ''From Here to there'', represented Canada at the 2003 Venice Biennale; the second, ''Waiting for High Water'', shot in Venice during the ''

acqua alta (, ; ) is the term used in Veneto, Italy for the exceptional tide peaks that occur periodically in the northern Adriatic Sea. The peaks reach their maximum in the Venetian Lagoon, where they cause partial flooding of Venice and Chioggia; flood ...

'' phenomenon, was presented at the Prague Biennale in 2005. ''Waiting for High Water'' became her most exhibited video installation (catalogue text from Hubert Damisch.) In 2012, Sterbak, a Canadian citizen since her twentieth birthday, received a Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts, and in 2017, she won the

Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas The Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas is an award by the Government of Quebec that is part of the Prix du Québec, given to individuals who are artists or craftsman in the fields of visual arts, of the trades of art, architecture and the design. It is na ...

(Quebec). "Her biography may not be directly reflected in her works, but it has provided a pool of experience for an examination of the question as to how different societies are connected with one another. These are questions pertaining to human conflicts in contemporary life, to the tension between the private and public spheres, between freedom and dependence. Jana Sterbak’s works are as poetic as they are political. They are conceptually precise, interweaving the immediacy of specific materials with references to motifs from mythology, literature and philosophy. Her materials are often ephemeral and transformative, such as the ice that forms the slowly melting chairs of ''Dissolution-Auditorium'', or the pieces of flesh sewn together to make a dress in her famous and much-discussed work and widely copied ''Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic''." Both are powerful metaphors for social as well as physical processes that speak to us explicitly on a personal and sensory level.

Awards

* 1991:

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, United States * 1993: Prix Antoine Guichard, Fondation Casino, Musée de Saint-Étienne, France (now discontinued) * 1993:

Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award The Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award is a monetary award given since 1971 by the Canada Council for the Arts to Canadian artists judged to be outstanding in their mid-careers. Since 2005, the award is given to one recipient in each of the followi ...

from the Canada Council * 1996: Prix

Ozias Leduc Ozias Leduc (October 8, 1864 - June 16, 1955) is one of Quebec's early painters. He was born in Saint-Hilaire-de-Rouville. Leduc produced many portraits, still lifes and landscapes, as well as religious works. Biography Leduc was mainly self-t ...

, Fondation Émile-Nelligan, Montreal * 2012:

Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts The Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts are annual awards for achievements in visual and media arts in Canada. Up to eight awards are presented annually with the prize amount is $25,000 Created in 2000 by then Governor General Adrie ...

, Canada * 2017:

, Québec

References

External links

Concordia University Art Historywww.janasterbak.comCorinne Diserens: Jana Sterbak. Velleitas
Exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies

at the

, Ottawa, Ontario {{DEFAULTSORT:Sterbak, Jana 1955 births Living people Canadian women sculptors 20th-century Canadian sculptors 21st-century sculptors Canadian people of Czech descent Artists from Prague Concordia University alumni Czechoslovak emigrants to Canada Canadian contemporary artists 20th-century Canadian women artists 21st-century Canadian women artists Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts winners