Intertwined

"Intertwined," a piece personally dedicated to Dr. Eugene Rogolsky by Anne Baruch, Oldřich Kulhánek uses his recognized symbol of hands. As the title suggests, two hands are in the process of intertwining; however, motion of the gesture also implies that thee hands could be separating, or untwining. Kulhánek once stated, “In my work you can find parts of the human face, pleading hands, raw hands. For me, the symbol is a way of expressing the age in which I live, the place where I live.” The two interpretations of the subject matter, intertwining versus untwining, may be suggestive of the social and political circumstances during which the piece was made: the untwining of the Soviet government from Czechoslovakia, and the intertwining of Czechoslovakia to the rest of the world after the fall of Soviet occupation. [Emily Le, 'Intertwined' in "Suppression, Subversion, and the Surreal: The Art of Czechoslovakian Resistance," (Los Angeles: USC Fisher Museum of Art, 2019) 32.]