Eastern Slovakia, as part of the Kingdom of Hungary, was said to be a kind of cultural and artistic periphery of the periphery for centuries. Of course, we can argue that many excellent works were created here as well, which were or are presented in the expositions of several world galleries. These include mainly Gothic panel paintings, statues of Master Pavle from Levoča, icons from temples (churches) of the Byzantine-Slavic rite, which were admired at exhibitions in Montreal, Osaka and Paris. So after all, in the end, despite the long-term conservatism, it wasn't such a peripheral spirit?

Contemporary trends in art were fully manifested after the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. After all, in the first third of the 20th century, paintings by Anton Jaszusch, Július Jakoby, later Dezider Milly and other authors were created, which could be part of important exhibitions of modern art. In the 1920s, an international group of authors known as Košická moderna (e.g. František Foltýn, Sándor Bortnyik, Eugen Krón) played a major role in the creative upsurge of artists in eastern Slovakia.

Even in the period after 1945, despite the artificial, top-down socialist realism, we find prominent personalities who, strangely enough, quite successfully implemented their own creative program. We will mention at least some artists: sculptors Ján Mathé, František Patočka, Juraj Bartusz, Dušan Pončák, painter and graphic artist Alexander Eckerdt.

Generationally, younger artists who began to develop their work in the 1980s, a time that was more favourable for art, generally no longer had to deal with the issue of political pressures.

Today, there are dozens of artists working in Eastern Slovakia who were still children during the totalitarian period or were born after 1989. Most of them are trying, and successfully, to develop their own creative programme. Compared to artists of previous decades, it is necessary to emphasize the effort to reflect theoretically on their creative path and to present such views and opinions to the public.

The works of some of them will be used as examples to highlight selected trends in the current art scene in Eastern Slovakia. Here we will find not only the peculiar use of classical media and procedures, but also experimentation and conceptual solutions to the problem.

The sculptor Ján Zelinka (1978, Vranov nad Topľou) exceeded the imaginary borders of the region with his work long ago. This is evidenced by the current exhibition of his works in one of the Kroměříž galleries[1].

Ján Zelinka profiled himself as an author quite early. Practically from the beginning of his independent work, he has been trying to materialize the theme of the fragility of life and the state after death of man, God-man and animal in both traditional and unconventional natural materials. As the sculptor himself once said, he is "searching for the essence". It is a search for the essence of being, the essence of form. He literally gets under the skin of the subject when he creates some of his sculptures by casting plaster into the skin of found dead animals.

The inclination to nature runs through the whole of the author's work. It is the materials, especially the specially treated peat, which he first used in 2003, that confirm his life and creative starting point: "Each individual has its own value. Everything organic turns into peat. This is precisely the state where all organisms are equal."[2] 

The end of life and death are associated with a tragic moment in Jan Zelinka's works. It is also the end of a life pilgrimage of three human individuals, siblings, that has not yet practically begun, which lasted only a few hours, and also of the motionless bodies of animals around the roads, almost unnoticed by their surroundings. All this and more appears in Jan Zelinka's sculptures and drawings. The author creates cycles of works in which he tries to express his intention as fully as possible. The plaster casts of the bodies of a horse, a cow and smaller animals from the series Seeking the Essence (2006-2014) lay bare the reality almost down to the bones of these organisms.

Equivalence as a principle in this artist, as already mentioned, applies not only to the animal world, but also to man. Reminiscences of ancient Egyptian culture, sarcophagi of sacred animals or members of all strata of society found an echo in the leaden "wrappings". In the works from the series Requiem for Organisms (since 2010), the bodies of foxes, cats, bees and other animals are loosely trapped in such contemporary sarcophagi, loosely replicating the airtight bodies of foxes, cats, bees and other animals.

The hints of shapes, the seeming incompleteness, the unfinishedness of the material used - this is also part of the characteristic of the contemporary Pieta - sculpture The Imagery (separate contexts), 2010. Some time ago, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava acquired it for its collections. It is currently housed in its new permanent exhibition, where it is adjacent to much smaller wooden folk sculptures with the same motif. This has created a very interesting intersection of traditional folk works with an emphasis on the mimetic element of depiction and today's variant of the expressive vision of the centuries-old motif of the close relationship between Mother and Son.

Oto Hudec (1981, Košice), multimedia artist, performer, expresses his relationship to nature, its protection and preservation of life, the climate crisis and migration through other action-oriented, conceptual works. Thanks to long-term creative stays abroad (Portugal, South Korea, Spain, USA) O. Hudec gained, among other things, direct experience with different social and cultural environment. The artist "consistently expands the anthropological model of art and his installations lead to self-reflexive processes within our culture through appropriation and deep understanding of the Other and the Other".[3]

The most recent is the Floating Arboretum project presented at the Venice Biennale, which is "dedicated to the people who stood up against power to protect trees and forests from destruction".[4] It asks the question of where trees (and life in general) will go when the Earth becomes a place where they cannot survive. Nor will man have anywhere to climb to save himself from danger. It can be assumed that it was this attitude of the artist that led the leaders of Slovakia to criticize and not accept the project that they did not understand.

This effort by O. Hudec's efforts were preceded by projects in which he participated significantly: Make Art with Purpose (San Fracisco / Dallas, USA, 2009 - 2012), which involved human-centred design that addressed social and environmental issues around the world, Karavan (2014, together with Daniela Krajčová), which focused on work and artistic activity with pupils from the marginalised Roma community.

Another form of contemporary artistic statement is represented by the work of Adam Macko (1989, Levoča). Similarly to the two previous authors from eastern Slovakia, A. Macko's work is closely connected with nature. Unlike them, he gives more space to painting, a significant part of which is focused on the exploration of physicality, the relationship between the image and its surrounding environment. Despite the fact that his favourite artists are the Neo-Expressionists and authors close to them (F. Bacon, G. Baselitz), we would not find in A. Macko's works would be visually similar. Relying heavily on his intuition, not shying away from chance, he creates works filled with hints, references to archetypes, in which, similarly to French informel painting, he likes to explore the very surface of the painting's surface. His words about the perception of himself and his contemporaries could be considered the voice of a generation: '...we didn't want to be a monolithic voice, but a generation that enjoys poking around in what used to be human, talking about it, creating in it, living it, and if it happens to be interesting, moving it on'.[5]  Even if it's on artificial skin.

Vladimír Ganaj (1990, Prešov), the youngest of the four selected artists, exemplifies the interconnection of realistic traditions, mimetic process and digital media. A painter and draughtsman, he creates landscapes, still lifes, figurative compositions filled with the intimate expressiveness of a distinctive gestural handwriting, which sometimes transitions into an abstract calligraphic mark.

The four artists working in eastern Slovakia personify the multilayered nature of contemporary art in what was once in many ways a backward corner of the country, where supposedly "there is nothing". We can see from these examples that there is a full cultural life here, comparable to other parts of European art.

 

 

 

[1] Kroměříž, Galerie Pekelné sáně, 12.4.-30.6.2024.

[2] Petronela. Ján Zelinka and his work on the border of life and death. In: A blog about art and architecture. Created 17.5.2021 [online]. Available at: https://kunstartum.com/tvorba-jan-zelinka

[3] Grúň, Daniel. Archipelago does not mean isolation, but connecting. In. Database of Contemporary Slovak Visual Art 2019 [online]. Available from: https://artbase.kunsthallebratislava.sk/umelec/417

[4] Floating Arboretum team's statement on the Venice Biennale 2024. In: Artalk. 18.4.2024 [online]. Cit. 30.4.2024. Available at: https://artalk.info/news/stanovisko-timu-floating-arboretum-na-benatskom-bienale-2024. See also: Kukurová, Lenka. Slovak "shame" at the Venice Biennale? In: Artalk. 23.4.2024 [online]. Cit. 30.4.2024. available at: https://artalk.info/news/slovenska-hanba-na-bienale-v-benatkach

[5] Macko, Adam. The 4 stages of separation. In. The Magazine 3 / 4 [online]. Cit. 30.4.2024. Available from: https://34.sk/4-stupne-odvylucenia