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Leonurdo,Vol. 6, pp. 329-330. Pergamon Press 1973. Printedin Great Britain ON SEVERAL PLEXIGLAS ART WORKS Ida Karskaya” and Ludmila Kaprasova** We met by chance when Kaprasovci came to Paris from Prague on an artist exchange program between France and Czechoslovakia. I (Karskaya) was familiar with the new technique developed in that country for making tapestries by machine sewing of freely laid wool on a support. This technique permitted a much freer use of the imagination than traditional tapestry techniques, such as that used by Aubusson. She (KaprasovB)had worked with the new tapestry technique but her main effort had been devoted to drawn thread work in sisal material and to macrame‘ or the art of knotted work with jute. I invited her to my studio and suggested that we do something together that we had not tried to do before. Our eyes lit upon a pile of Plexiglas scrap of pink, violet and silvery blue translucent colors that had been left in my studio by an engineer. We handled the material and experienced a pleasant feeling that is difficult to describe. Surely we could make something from this material. For our first work we selected circular and rectangular pieces and connected them with strong string to make an assemblag? 25 to 30 cm deep in parts (Fig. 1). When light is projected on the panel, * Artist living at 41 rue Charlot, 75003-Paris, France. ** Artist living at U Malvazinsky 2060, Smichov, Prague V, Czechoslovakia. (Received 30 June 1972.) Fig. 1. “Panneaux”, assemblage, Plexiglas sheet and Fig. 2. “Ophdie sortie de 1’eau”, assemblage, Plexiglas sheet, string etc., 200 x 45 x 30 cm, 1972. string, 300 x 150 x 30 cm, 1972. 329 330 Ida Karskaya and Ludmila Kaprasovd Fig.3, Untitled, mobile, Plexiglas sheet, 280 x 100 x 25 cm, 1972. colored shadows of large variety are cast upon a wall. By arranging the disposition and superposition of pieces of different color, we could control to suit our taste both the character of the assemblage and the shadows produced on a wall. Our second assemblage, which we called ‘OphClie sortie de I’eau’ (Fig. 2), was made of pieces of Plexiglas in which we burned holes and distorted them with a heated piece of metal. This treatment gave us the feelingthat we had transformed the scrap material into something with a romantic quality. Melting of the Plexiglas gave us the idea of connecting pieces together with heat instead of using string. In Fig. 3 is shown a portion of a mobile made of strips of thin Plexiglas strips distorted and connected together by the application of heat. The shadows cast by the mobile on a wall made us think of them as actors on a stage in a theater. The actors show expressive faces, move about and speak words written for them but everyone knows that at the back of the stagethere arethose who make the dream world possible. When we had filled my studio walls, it wastime for Kaprasova to return to Czechoslovakia. I was left with the works but I gave her a poem inspired by what we had made together from a pile of Plexiglas scrap. ...

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