Jana
An unprecedented movement of the Czechoslovak population is also connected to the period of Normalization, when starting in the 1970s a third of the population moved to residential buildings made of prefabricated concrete panels. This completely new form of housing generated serious as well homemade ways of coping with existence in a strictly standardized, uniform and uprooted environment. Suddenly you had to sacrifice to completely different gods for your domestic happiness, to cope with completely different contents, scales and proportions, to set your functioning in an untried, strange reality. A multi-cell organism, which was supposed to beat in unified rhythm, insistently counting down five-year plans, appeared to be defective from the beginning, the mining of the feeling of home from that organisim went reluctantly and with hiccups. Grey masses of arrogant concrete panels essentially transformed the picture of the country, and the peaceful, mostly rural panorama was dynamized by vigorous industrial interventions. People worked in factories and lived in pre-fab houses—it was socialist happiness in real life. Jana Machatová completes these concrete bucolics in her jewelry out of deference to the period feeling and in the sense of a personal, sentimental-ironic poetics with an opulent golden background which she tenderly overlays with blueprint arabesques.
—Viera Kleinová