Over the course of his life, Lubo Kristek has visited various places around the world. He enjoyed wandering through the landscape and tried to discover and understand its essence, as he did with its inhabitants and their way of life. These were trips, drifting and wandering which had an inner meaning for his life and work, because when wandering through an alien landscape and culture one can free oneself of the things one knows (or feels that knows) about the world. All of a sudden, people can perceive things and phenomena in the present and existentially enhanced moment. In this way, Kristek returned to the prototype of man who strode through the landscape, had an opportunity to stop and think, and who left his own trace and imprint on it. Kristek has left his artistic footprint in the landscape on the coast of Cantabria, near San Vicente de la Barquera. It is the assemblage Barbed Wire of Christ (1983), the metal body of which is a pitiful relic of the current mechanised, dehumanised, rationalised world.
Barbora Půtová, Charles University