Zorka Ságlová

Zorka Ságlová (1943–2003) was a Czech textile artist, painter, and performance artist.

Biography Ságlová was born in 1942 in the town of Humpolec. Her mother was a teacher and seamstress and her father was a financial clerk. Her brother, Ivan Martin "Magor" Jirous (1944–2011) went on to become a poet and artistic director of the dissident psychedelic rock band Plastic People of the Universe. Her cousin, the prominent Czech modern art historian Jifií Padrta, influenced her artistic interests from an early age. After the Prague Spring, she carried out more collective actions, often in rural areas.

The installation "Hay-Straw" took place in August 1969, in Václav Špala Gallery in Prague. She placed bales of hay in the gallery, and they constantly changed shape as they became rearranged and scattered throughout the rooms. On one hand, the avant-garde nature of the installation shocked the art establishment, but on the other, it was a poetic and traditional work.

For "Laying out Nappies near Sudoměř" in May 1970, she and her friends laid out 700 white cloths across a field, reportedly the site of the historical battlefield of the Battle of Sudoměř in 1420. According to legend, the local Hussite women spread cloths over the battlefield to impair the invading Catholic army, whose horses' legs would become tangled in the cloths. participants inflated hundreds of condoms like balloons and released them out of the windows of an abandoned castle. The happening's name comes from the name of a well-known condom manufacturer in prewar Czechoslovakia, who used crude slogans in advertisements. and the Benedikt Rejt Gallery in Louny in 2007, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové in 2017. Her works have been exhibited internationally, for example in the 1998 exhibition Out of Actions (MOCA Los Angeles, MAK Vienna, MAC Barcelona, and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), the 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Haus der Kunst Munich, MOCA Los Angeles) and Art in Europe 1945 – 1968 (2016, ZKM Karlsruhe). In 2019–2020, the Wende Museum exhibited her work in the Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain.