Františka Gilman was born in Prague in 1973. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she developed a conceptual artistic sensibility that borrows core themes from past generations, such as loss, retention, space, perception and Gestalt (introduced to sculpture in the 1960s). Contrary to her husband, not much is known about Františka Gilman’s professional career and trajectory.
Artistically, her conceptual work is the result of a symbiotic relationship with her husband Tim Gilman, begun in 1998. In this context, one personality is difficult to separate from the other. Their corpus is multidisciplinary, but certain core themes run through the plethora of media they use and approaches they favour. The erasure of architecture is one, several works seemingly questioning how built mass society could be made to disappear to reach greater spatial balance between presence and absence. The concept of hidden spaces, such as those behind a door, under a staircase or as memory, is also a key trope. Retention, copying and, again, deletion of information are a constant focus in contrasting mechanical and human potential. Through memory, they broach the subject of subjectivity, individuality and intimacy, often explored in their art through spatial means. The fragment and the whole are timeless motifs that find an architectonic and hyperrealist variation in their body of work.
