Gallery Helps to Open Doors for Eastern Europeans

Two years ago, Bozena Kohler-Hotz, a third-generation art collector who was born in Czechoslovakia and who has lived in Los Angeles 10 years, planned to open an art gallery with primarily Italian and French art. Then the Velvet Revolution took place. Playwright Vaclav Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia, and Kohler-Hotz changed her mind.

The Velvet Revolution “stole my heart,” she says, and she chose instead to present the work of Czechoslovak artists, many of whom had worked in isolation during the Communist regime. Almost without exception, their art had not been shown in the United States.

The BKH Gallery opened its doors in October, 1990, in a small, neighborhood shopping area on Roscomare Road near her Bel-Air home. One hundred artists donated lithographs for BKH’s first exhibition, to raise funds for Czechoslovakia’s new democracy. Some of them had survived 40 years of Soviet oppression. Today, Kohler-Hotz represents 10 artists exclusively, and often shows the work of other Czechoslovak artists as well.

“My primary interest is to introduce these artists to Los Angeles,” Kohler-Hotz said. “I want to help them open the door to business. I prefer to sponsor artists who were forgotten or didn’t have opportunities under the old regime.”

A variety of art styles and mediums can be found here: biting surrealism and naive painting, classical and modern sculpture, animation illustrations and photojournalism. Some of Milon Novotny’s photographs of Havel were published in Life magazine.

Kohler-Hotz continually exhibits works by the artists she represents; additionally, each month she organizes a more comprehensive show around a theme or an individual artist. Last December’s “Franz Kafka’s Echo on Art” showed the work of artists who have been influenced by Kafka and moved to paint, draw or sculpt the writer’s likeness.

In April, the gallery presented the paintings, collages, watercolors, paper cuts and lithographs of Frantisek Dvorak (born 1925). Because of his opposition to Communist rule, he could not exhibit his work in Prague, where he lived. Until the 1989 revolution, his work had been shown in an underground gallery housed in a barn about 40 miles away.

BKH has also presented a show of abstract paintings and collages by Vincent Venera (born 1958). He was repeatedly arrested and jailed during Communist rule for making statements about freedom. A heavy-metal musician and singer as well, he is an idol of the younger generation, Kohler-Hotz said.

This month, the gallery is spotlighting the sculpture and drawings of Lyuba Prusak, who received a diploma in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and a master’s degree in art at Cal State Northridge. She has lived in the Los Angeles area since 1968, when she fled Czechoslovakia with her husband and daughter during the Soviet crackdown.

“We decided to leave on Wednesday, and we left on Friday,” she said, adding that her sculptures had to remain behind and were stolen. “The Czech authorities knew we weren’t coming back, but they cooperated with us against the Russians.”

Prusak’s work merges literary and historical references from the old country with effects of California culture. Her portrait busts of Kafka and his girlfriend, Milena Jesenska, have been made from a charcoal high-firing process that she became “hooked on,” she said, during her art studies here.

She sculpted the bust of Gen. George Patton because she lived in a village near Pilsen and remembers clearly how he and his army liberated that part of Czechoslovakia. Three “Golem” figures are based on a 16th-Century tale from Prague of a rabbi who made an artificial man, to handle all kinds of menial chores for the poor. “The Golem is a predecessor of the robot,” she said.

In contrast, three sculpted heads--”Pensive Head,” “Made in Love” and “Man Afraid of Death”--are thoroughly contemporary in content and style. “Man Afraid of Death” was inspired by Picasso’s last self-portrait. Prusak has also used a polyester casting resin to create organic forms that call to mind the mountains, ocean and seashells of California. “With Lyuba Prusak, I have four artists in one,” Kohler-Hotz said.

“Lyuba Prusak’s Sculpture and Drawings” at the BKH Gallery, 2337 Roscomare Road, Bel-Air, through Dec. 15. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Call (310) 476-4493.

“SACRED VISIONS”: In the state of Nayarit, Mexico, today’s Huichol Indians continue to believe in the spiritual ideas of their pre-Columbian ancestors. Because Nayarit’s rugged mountain terrain was difficult to penetrate, the Spanish did not arrive there until 200 years after their first compatriots reached the shores of Mexico. They had only minimal influence on this indigenous people’s life and religious practices.

“The Huichols worship a pantheon of gods who personify nature. The oldest one is a woman whom they believe created the world and everything in it,” said Stacy Schaefer during a lecture before the opening of “Shamans, Pilgrims and Sacred Visions: The Art and Life of Mexico’s Huichol Indians,” at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery.

Schaefer, a University of Texas professor, curated the exhibit. She has gone to Mexico every year since 1977 to live among the Huichols and has completed a number of stages in the Huichol woman’s “way toward wisdom and spiritual knowledge,” including learning to weave with a traditional back-strap loom.

Schaefer has also participated in pilgrimages conducted by Huichol shamans to their sacred peyote desert. “The pilgrimages are a re-enactment of their creation myth,” she said. “They eat peyote in pure form or dried powder within a ceremonial context, and duplicate their colorful geometric hallucinations in their weaving designs. These visions are considered communications from the gods.”

For a glimpse of contemporary Huichol life, Schaefer has brought together at Laband such art and artifacts as traditional dress, woven belts and embroidered bags. There are handmade musical instruments, votive arrows, a shaman’s chair and a ceremonial medicinal drum.

Photographs of Huichols accompany written descriptions of their history and religious customs. The highlight of the show, though, is the collection of intricate, colorful yarn paintings depicting narrative and mythical exploits of their gods.

These Native Americans are not completely isolated from the greater world, however. Ironically, the attractive beads used in their art and wares came from Czechoslovakia.

“Shamans, Pilgrims, and Sacred Visions,” at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Boulevard at West 80th Street, Los Angeles, through Dec. 14. Open 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. Closed Thanksgiving weekend. Call (310) 338-2880.