Von Antje Mayer, Manuela Hötzl.
Von Antje Mayer, Manuela Hötzl.
Laco Teren
Wild und surreal
Laco Teren (b. 1960) studied at the Academy of Applied Art and Design (1979-1986). He belongs to the generation of artists who caused a furore in the Bratislava of the mid-1980s with their “wild” painting – an expression of and, not least, an anti-attitude towards the all-dominating, “so very ambitious concept art” (Teren) of that time. His often large-format, and in appearance Post-Modern images feature classical motifs such as still-lives and portraits, which he defamiliarises through the use of a garish colour palette and other things, into a surreal or absurd appearance. Besides his painting, Teren also creates sculptures of a similar surreal content. “Art imitates life, life often imitates arts“, is how the artist himself describes his work. Teren is also the initiator of the first artists’ gallery in Bratislava, founded in 1989. It is called M+.
Denisa Lehocká
Poetry Without Words
Denisa Lehocká, (b. 1971) is a representative of the Bratislava scene of the 1990s. For the past five years, she has been intensely exhibiting her work in both individual and group exhibitions.
Lehocká is said to be a rather shy artist who does not realise her works in any interaction with the public but rather in the withdrawn isolation of her studio. In a general sense her work can be described as feminist, “but less so in political terms, than in a physical one”, says Ondreicka. In her “spatial arrangements”, Lehocká recombines various levels of perception and of reality; things from nature, like stones or branches, everyday objects like ropes or glasses are combined with new and also classic artistic media such as drawings and sculptures. Her “landscapes” are staged both dramaturgically as well as casually, whereby it is less the narrative or conceptual element than the poetical in her work which is of significance. Her husband (Boris Ondreicka, with whom she also collaborates a lot) describes her work as “poetry without words” and as “extremely precise and sensitive.”
Roman Ondák
Steelworker’s Chocolate
Roman Ondák (b. 1966) is among the international shooting stars of the Bratislavan artists’ scene. So, for the exhibition, Ausgeträumt [disenchanted] …” at the Vienna Secession in 2001, he parked a number of Slovak cars in the parking lot behind the Secession – which passers-by would not immediately recognise as an art statement. Ondák intended to get people to start thinking about status symbols, poverty, clichés about the East, but also the very pragmatic everyday problem of how to find a parking space. As part of the 4th Austrian Photography Triennial 2003, the artist confused the citizens of Graz in a similar way. He stuck an oriental rug clearly visible across the projecting balustrade of the town hall, leaving the main question unanswered. Was this a festive decoration? Was it a political statement? Or was the old rug just being aired?
One extraordinarily poetic work is his installation entitled Passage (2004), which he conceived as artist-in-residence in Japan. The artist asked some 500 steelworkers there to eat chocolate and then to form shapes from the silver foil wrapping. They actually did this and Ondák subsequently exhibited their work.
It is typical of Ondák that he opts for calm, personal, private and intimate signs and gestures, jiggling the familiar and quotidian in such a way that he motivates the viewer to inquire into the whys and wherefores. The viewer is invited to freely associate, without having to refer back to major cultural and theoretical aspects.
Anetta Mona Chisa
Sex With Bourriaud?
This Romanian born artist is one of the key figures of the Slovakian capital’s young art scene. Anyone dealing with the local art and cultural scene during the past few years has inevitably come across her. As a communicator and curator she knows everybody and everybody knows her. Some while ago she relocated to Prague, “to catch some fresh air”, as she put it, where she has an assistant lectureship at the University of Visual Arts, teaching a course in new media. For her 2005 performance Uncomfortable Heritage, realised jointly with her partner of many years, Lucia Tkacová, she placed three girls at a private party, trussed up in traditional Slovak garb and scarves, into a tiny bathroom, which they weren’t allowed to leave. “Even if the young women were not to become active in any way, the mere fact of their disturbing presence was sure to lead to intensive communication with the visitors to the bathroom”, says Chisa.
Her works are full of irony and humour, even as she picks up on classic feminist and socially critical tenets. Her motto reads: “Feminism is (not) funny.” In one of her video works, for example, the ironically and yet at the same time seriously, titled Seductive Verwertung [Seductive Utilisation], we see the artist in conversation with Lucia Tkacová debating the question, at what price one might have sex with art critic and theoretician, and influential director of the Palais de Tokyo, Nicolas Bourriaud. “A solo exhibition or just a group exhibition at his house? A mention in one of his texts?” Both women appear undecided at just what price they might agree to “sleep their way up” as artists.
Július Koller
UFO-Look
Július Koller (b. 1939) is one of the most important representatives of his generation in Slovakia. “His subversiveness, irony and whimsical humour are simply inimitable”, says Boris Ondrei_ka. In his manifesto, published in 1965, Koller talked for the first time about his concept of the so-called “anti-happenings”, as well as his “anti-images and “anti-environments.” In Koller’s perception, “anti-happenings” are actions which create new cultural situations inside non-specific spaces, preferably without any artistic direction-giving. In other words, they are localities which do not exclusively serve to represent art.
This subversive strategy had become necessary due to the political situation in the former Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the Prague Spring, when artists like Koller could only be active in the underground or stage actions which were not clearly specifiable by the government censors.
At the beginning of the 1970s, therefore, Koller transformed himself into a “UFO-naut”, a creature that, put simply, interferes with everyday situations by way of minimal gestures. “I believe that we humans are not only terrestrial, but also extra-terrestrial beings. The “UFO-naut” is an entity that travels through space and time”, Koller explained. In the years that followed he would create a new “UFO-naut” look for himself, each year, which was to represent, another being or “symbolic gestalt” respectively, as a supposedly “extra-terrestrian” commentary on the political and social situation of the day. By the mid-1990s, Koller was gradually being rediscovered in his own country and also became known in the West, largely via the solo exhibition curated by Roman Ondák in 2003 at the Kölnische Kunstverein.
XYZ
Violatingly Vulnerable
The Bratislavan artists’ group XYZ is still in the “local matadors” (Ondrei_ka) ranks, but is gradually receiving some international recognition. The artists Milan Tittel (b. 1966) and Matej Gavula (b. 1972), who have been collaborating since 1988, usually work with confusing actions and installations, and in so doing, often cross the borderlines between performance art and theatre, where they also work as directors. Both originally came from sculpture, which both Matej Gavula and Milan Tittel studied in Bratislava at the Academy for Applied Arts, the latter also designing glass from time to time. The theme of the alternating relations between size and energy has featured in many of their works. In the exhibition XYZ WAR (2001) at the Priestor Gallery in Bratislava, for instance, Milan Tittel enlarged parts of his skin to an immense size placing it beside extremely miniaturised weapons. In the exhibition, Group Portrait – Triple Presence (2005, tranzit workshop) they displayed five wax figurines of themselves in a glass case. “The self-portraits of the artists became representations of a cloned identity”, wrote the Bratislavan art critic, Daniel Grün. Above these figurines, the artists hung life-sized group photos. The contrast between violating and vulnerable, group and individual, small and large, this is what comprises XYZ’s alphabet.