50 Years Young!
A Selection from the Collection of the Nitra Gallery on the Occasion of its 50th Anniversary
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Nitra Gallery, we have
prepared an exhibition that offers new insight into the Gallery‘s collection. Currently, it
consists of 4715 pieces of art, and in addition to the traditional media of painting, sculpture,
drawing and graphic art, there is a significant number of objects, installations, photographs
and new media (especially videos) that document the transformation of art, which started in
the 1960s and still continues to present day.
The core of the exhibition is formed by works from the second half of the 20th century
and the first two decades of the 21st century – the period the Nitra Gallery‘s exhibiting,
acquisition and scientific activities focus on the most. These works, added to the Gallery‘s
collection mainly after 1989, have been combined with the oldest works from our collection,
which were created in the 18th and 19th centuries, and above all with works from the first half
of the 20th century, on the grounds of certain thematic and formal analogies. Thanks to this
selection, the viewer has an opportunity to learn about various historical and formal stages of
art that arose over the last 100 years, beginning with early modernism, through late
modernism and postmodernism, all the way to contemporary art. With the help of this
curatorial strategy, based on the search for new relations and connections between works of
art from various periods, we want to disrupt the gap between the old, modern and
contemporary art that seems – and is stereotypically believed – to exist.
Considering the importance of the occasion that this exhibition has been prepared for,
it is being held in all the exhibition spaces the Gallery owns (the Representative Halls, the
Salon, the Youth Gallery and the Bunker). We would like this project to be understood as a
kind of simulation of a near future, in which the Gallery has a space for a permanent
exhibition of the works from its collection.
The exhibition with the focus on contemporary art is based upon the Nitra Gallery‘s
long-term goal to complement its collection with works by Slovak artists, since they are either
underrepresented or absent – also due to unsystematic purchases and gifts that were
realised/accepted before 1989. Thus, we are trying to complete a representative collection of
Slovak 20th and 21st century art in gradual stages.
The acquisition activities of the Gallery currently have two priorities. The first one is
the purchase of works by the older and middle-aged generation of artists, who influenced
Slovak art of the second half of the 20th century in a radical way. Since these artists entered
the scene mostly from the 1960s onwards, the purchase of their works is often a „rescue“ of
the last pieces, created in the most significant periods of the artists‘ careers, that are
available. The second priority is the purchase of works by the younger, and youngest,
generation of artists; those who are becoming well known in their home country and are
gradually gaining respect in international artistic circles as well. This orientation results from
the character of two specific exhibition spaces – the Youth Gallery, established in 2001, and
the Bunker, an alternative exhibition space that came into existence in 2008 after the
renovation of an underground civil defence shelter. It was the unconventional industrial
space of the Bunker that inspired us to invite the younger generation of promising artists
(Mira Podmanická, Nina Šošková, Martin Kochan and Jaroslav Kyša) to use its potential and
create site-specific works related to the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Nitra Gallery.
The concept of the exhibition has allowed us to divide the existing Nitra Gallery
collection dramaturgically into several thematic areas based on their media, artistic genres
and topics, as well as their visual and contentual similarities and analogies. We have, thus,
chosen a curatorial strategy that has allowed us to go beyond the classical method of
chronological classification of artworks and their linear reading in the context of the history of
art.
The thematic area related to the genre of portrait is represented in the highest
numbers at the exhibition. We are presenting portraits in various forms, from historical (Jozef
Zanussi), through classical (Maximilián Schurmann, Raimund Wichera), modernist (Ladislav
Guderna), surrealist (Karol Baron), all the way to their most current forms (Peter Ančic), in
order to show their transformation in terms of style and the media used (eg. sewn textile
portraits by Vlasta Žáková), as well as in terms of a new understanding of this genre, where
the features that are inextricably connected with portraits (a face, a head), may be absent
(Peter Meluzin).
In a special subgroup, a selection of self-portraits is presented. There, fundamental
differences are visible in the understanding of the artistic subject (Milota Havránková, Rudolf
Sikora), often reduced to a signature (Michal Murin); as well as, surprisingly, certain formal
similarities between the present (Veronika Rónaiová) and the past (Ladislav Guderna).
A surprising effect can be perceived when comparing a traditional portrayal depiction
of Milan Rastislav Štefánik (Gustáv Adolf Schüle) with a current attempt to personally come
to terms with the personality of this scientist and statesman (Martin Piaček). Another work by
Martin Piaček that is presented, titled Touching the Hero, falls beyond our traditional
understanding of genres (portrait above all). The installations contain a figurative link to the
identity of the public figures depicted, although it is not directly related to their physiognomy
or character, but to the manner of their tragic deaths. The artist works with collection objects
– relics, which refer to four significant figures from the Slovak history: Juraj Jánošík, Ľudovít
Štúr, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Alexander Dubček.
Another classical genre presented at the exhibition is the still life, mainly represented
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by 20 century artists (František Studený, Milan Paštéka, and others). By combining some
modernist still lives, dominated by the matter-of-factness of things (the motif of a bottle in the
works by Ester Šimerová-Martinčeková and Ladislav Guderna), with three contemplative
objects from the Etuis cycle by Monogramista T. D, we have created a visually suggestive
subgroup. Not only for the sake of amusement, we have created a pair, where a still life with
the theme of a traditional Slovak food – bacon and bread (František Studený) – is linked to
the view of a contemporary artist, who perceives bacon smoked by his grandmother as the
symbol of home (Tomáš Džadoň, animation titled Slovakearth). Currently, the artists of the
youngest generation are returning to traditions, seeing them in a new context and using the
contemporary language and media.
In an attempt to show analogies between older and contemporary arts, categories
have been created that confront works based on their genres, like in the case of bust
(Ladislav Čarný, Jozef Kostka), or of the various forms of depicting landscapes, whether
these are natural (Ernest Zmeták, Michal Czinege, Maximilán Schurmann, Bohdan
Hostiňák), urban (Lucia Tallová), conceptual (Juraj Bartoš), Slovak mountains (Martin Benka,
Miloš Alexander Bazovský, Edmund Gwerk, Vladimír Popovič), or with the motif of the sea
(František Studený, Ladislav Guderna, Orest Dubay, and Rastislav Podoba).
In some other categories, our starting point was the related theme of the works, for
example when we introduce the depiction of Christian iconography in a traditional form (Elias
Mögel) and in an innovative, contemporary form (Dorota Sadovská, Klára Bočkayová and
Matúš Lányi). The Madonna and Child motif– so common in historical art – is presented in a
more modernist, secularised form of a mother with her child (Gustáv Mallý, Július Bártfay,
Ján Mudroch), which is confronted with a video by Vladimír Kordoš, quoting the Renaissance
painter Giovanni Bellini. The celebration of a woman also appears in the motif of a rural bride
(Janko Alexy). Its counterpoint is the approach of young artist Lucia Tallová, who has
appropriated period wedding photographs from the beginning of the 20th century, which she
comments on using the medium of painting.
Works that deal with the theme of death are also part of the exhibition. The skull as
one of the traditional vanitas symbols is thematised in the contemporary paintings by Robert
Bielik. Another aspect is represented in the expressive stylisation of the Indian ink drawings
by František Studený from the 1940s.
We have succeeded in creating interesting „neighbours“ in the section where –
through the works of several artists – we have indicated a full spectrum of possible
approaches to the motif of music – from the classical bust (the portrait of composer Ludwig
van Beethoven by Július Bartfay), through figural genre art compositions (the theme of
concerts by Ernest Špitz) and a more abstract painting of a musician with cubist features
(Ester Šimerová-Martinčeková), all the way to the experimental – flat as well as threedimensional – graphical scores by Milan Adamčiak. In a similar way, we have conceived a
section that shows various forms of the nude, where – through comparing the contemporary
female artists‘ (Jana Želibská and Monika Pascoe
Mikyšková) way of tackling this theme with the approach of the older generation (Rudolf
Uher, Eugen Krón and others) – fundamental differences in ideas and concepts have
become apparent. The only exception might be an object by Marián Mudroch, where he has
appropriated nudes of women walking down the stairs by three significant artists – Eadweard
Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp and Gerhard Richter.
The notion of the book as an object, a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th
century, represented at the exhibition in some works by Rudolf Fila, Peter Kalmus and Martin
Derner, is confronted with a classical still life oil painting by Hungarian painter Alfred Lakos
from the beginning of the 20th century. Another type of interesting „neighbourhoods“ arose
around works based on simple, often witty, visual analogies – like the motif of legs in the
works by Jana Farmanová, Vladimír Popovič and Jozef Theodor Mousson, the market theme
(Jozef Theodor Mousson, Jozef Kollár and Mária Machatová), or the interior of a flat (Eugen
Nevan and Monogramista T. D).
A separate part is a group of works that comprise various forms of links to traditional
Slovak folklore. We have created a kind of developmental scale, where we grouped a
classical figural genre art scene (Ján Hála), its modernist stylisation (Milan Laluha), an
ironizing addition of some typical folk objects (a traditional flask and ratchet) in the works of
contemporary artists (Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tk áčová) and the folklore that forms
one of the layers of the hybrid, ironic-absurd pictures by the young artist duo Jarmila
Mitríková and Dávid Demjanovič.
The exhibition attempts to connect the past with the present on the basis of purely
visual similarities of the depicted motifs. As a result, an unexpected and impressive
combination of the classic artist Maximilián Schurmann‘s work with the contemporary
photographs by Olja Triaška Stefanovič has been created.
Another connection that might seem unexpected at first glance is that of the two
historically distant artists – Martin Benka and Svätopluk Mikyta, whose exhibited works deal
with the theme of mass gymnastics. While Mikyta criticises the ideological background of the
socialist Spartakiad, Benka‘s paintings of the gatherings of the Sokol organisation, the
member of which he was in 1909 – 1939, were made to order.
A separate category consists of the works from the second half of the 20th century
that deal with texts and letters as such in various ways (Juraj Meliš, Jiří Valoch, Peter Rónai
and Miroslav Nicz). The exhibition also presents one of the relatively widely spread strategies
of contemporary art, where the artists shift banal objects – such as pieces of clothing (Otis
Laubert and Karol Pichler), handkerchiefs (Martin Knut), furniture and fishing rods (Pavla
Sceranková) or cigarette butts (Michal Studený) – into new semantic and visual contexts.
The principle of illusion is another interesting and multi-layered phenomenon, the
aspects of which we have tried to illustrate on the diverse selection of the works from our
collection that were created by artists active within the second half of the 20th century.
These are the works that use the contemporary forms of trompe l‘oeil (Milan Bočkay), the
illusion of movement (Milan Dobeš), space (Marko Blažo) or light (Martin Sedlák). The
viewers are also confronted with a more sophisticated version of connecting virtual and real
images (Mira Gáberová), the projection of illusionary human figures (Ilona Németh) and
hyper-realistic details of the human body occurring in places where one would not expect
them to (Stano Masár).
As an example of the application of sociological and psychological strategies in
contemporary art, we have selected two videos in which the artists use a monologue and a
dialogue as two different forms of narration. While the work by Pavlína Fichta Čierna is a
therapeutic monologue – an authentic patient‘s testimony of her mental illness that affects
her every-day life, the video by Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová is a dialogue – one
where the two artists turn a typically masculine way of assessing women upside down,
picking men as the sex objects of their ironic comments.
We hope that – thanks to our choice of curatorial selection and the confrontation of
works from diverse thematic, formal and contentual groups – we have managed to introduce
our exhibition attendees, at least partially, to the diversity of our Gallery‘s collection, and to
show them that new and old art can create very interesting connections; often challenging,
unexpected or witty.
Barbora Geržová & Omar Mirza