Martin Derner
Martin Derner was born in 1973 has a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of Bratislava, Slovakia. His work is related to direct intervention on different supports, with mixed media.
Jaroslav Kysa
Jaroslav Kysa was born in 1981 in Czechoslovakia, lives and works in Bratislava, Slovakia. In his works, he trying to reflect contemporary society and confront a viewer with constantly changing presence and our insecure future. Through use of laws of physics and nature in his multimedia works, he contemplates upon humanity and its geopolitical issues. Thanks to magnetism, electrical mechanisms and software, he disrupts the functioning of gravity and perception of time. He brings attention to “short circuits” of reality and its understanding. By corruption of basic human beliefs and knowledge about physical principles, He encourages questioning of general certitudes. He investigates into both conceptual and material essence of works created, which results in the interaction of a viewer with the work. A viewer thus becomes a part of “short circuit” of reality.
Viktor Freso
Frešo´s artwork is usually funny, with a punch line, despite their variable potentiality exactlyconstructed. Frešo also confidently works in the sphere of postproduction, though he becamefamous for his objects equipped with various wheels that allowed him to release a playful,nonsensical artistic expression while simultaneously attacking borders of constructive and conceptualwork.
Marek Kvetán
For more than a decade, Marek Kvetán is a significant part of Slovak art scene. Since the end of the 1990‘s, he is dedicated to making objects, installations, videos or computer prints, and he is known for his consistent conceptual gesture – creating “strong metaphors” and thought shortcuts that (mainly in his spatial work) often express a sarcastic view of the society, religion, poli- tics or media, or even question the traditional perception of the artistic disciplines (for instance painting) as such.
Svatopluk Mikyta
Svatopluk Mikyta graduated of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, and awarded an DAAD grant from 2001 to 2002 at the UDK Berlin. In 2008, he won the Oskár Čepan Award for young Slovak artist, in 2009 he took part in a ISCP residency in New York, in 2011 he won the Strabag Art Award. He leads the Drawing studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. His works are in the collections of the Slovak National Gallery, the Bratislava City Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, MUDAM Luxemburg and others institutions and private collections.
Milan Vagač
Milan Vagač is young slovak artist working with wide range of media, including painting, object or installation. He used original modernist ideas for the definition of role of contemporary geometric abstraction. Vagač conceptualized the process of painting itself and reveals the hidden layers and structures of painting. The abstract paintings are becoming a construction plans for further implementation to the space in the form of objects or installations. Milan Vagač is a doctoral student on the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, he works like an editor of magazine about contemporary drawing. He lives and works in Prague.
Peter Sit
Peter Sit (1991) studies in the Studio of photography led by Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague. In 2012 he became the co-founder of the civil association called Apart (apart.sk), which aims to support connection of people with the interest of activating cultural life and to create the optimal terms for mediation of visual art and photography to the public, especially by project-based and publication activities (the core of the association are currently beside Sit also Denis Kozerawski, Andrej Žabkay and graphic designer Magda Scheryová). In his artworks he went through wholly medium of photography to more widely media based and situationally concieved acts. The creating itself is for the author a tool for discovering, examining and at the same time living the life and everyday reality that he naturally captures with art. He is active in various spheres of culture. Until now his bigger group project has been the participation at the discourse platform 'Revolution without Movement' , iniciated by Gallery HIT and association tranzit.sk in November 2014, in which together with Erik Janeček and Matej Myslovič a social club was re-iniciated in the space of the gallery, referring to the former same usage of this place a long time ago. He had a solo exhibition in December 2014 in Bratislava and at the end of January 2015 in Ústí nad Labem.
Jana Kapelová was born in 1982 in Trnava, Slovakia. She graduated in 2006 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Banská Bystrica and with PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava in 2013. How can an individual change or subvert established societal norms and conventions, or even escape them? This question seems to be the key theme in the work of Jana Kapelová. In her artworks there is an interplay of institutional critique, which reflects her cultural and political involvement in the field of art, and a philosophical concern for the options an individual has in order to bypass or transform a (dysfunctional) social system and thereby arrive at self-realization.
Jana Kapelová
Radovan Čerevka was born in 1982, Košice, Slovakia. He is graduated from The Technical University of Košice and during his studies participated in the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. Čerevka completed his PhD studies in the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava. Radovan Čerevka belongs to the first generation of graduates from the Atelier of 3D Free Creativity with professor Juraj Bartusz at the Faculty of Arts, Technical University in Košice. Čerevka’s practice is characterized by conceptual work with mass media, especially in the context of the international political, economic and humanitarian evetnts mediated by the news channels. He is interested in the power of truth, globally spread and locally accepted, with work that integrates aspects of activism and his own civic engagement. His recent topics included terrorist and military actions like the attack on Fallujah, the Beslan school attack, underground smugglilng in Gaza and a general interrest in the political situation in Iran and Chechnya. He is a member of the group Kassaboys.
Radovan Čerevka
Tomas Rafa was born in 1979 in Zilina, Slovakia. He graduated from the Department of Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia. Tomas Rafa’s work explores the line between patriotism and nationalism. Through photographs and videos, Rafa focuses on displays of racism and xenophobia in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Over the last three years, Rafa has created a video project set against the background of political demonstrations, blockades, protests, and scenes of everyday life in these countries. The project features group demonstrations and displays of extremism where national and sexual majorities are in opposition to minorities, often complimented with the artist’s own actions and performances. Just as the famous Czech director Karel Vachek, Rafa keeps the camera on at all times during these events, even when the journalists have left. In this way, the footage presents situations one would not have the chance to see on a television news program. Rafa won the Oskár Čepan’s Award for 2011 in Slovakia.
Tomas Rafa
Petra Feriancova was born in 1977 in Bratislava, Slovakia. She currently lives and works in Bratislava. She studied at L’Accademia delle Belle Arti, Rome, Italy and Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia.Petra Feriancova’s work conceptualises her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory and examines the conditions of their sharing. Feriancova works mostly with found pictures, texts and archives which she interprets and methodically interchanges. Her primary aim in the manipulation of a reference, pictorial or discursive, is to provide the spectator with an original affective reaction to it.
Petra Feriancova
Štefan Papčo
Štefan Papčo was born in 1983 in Ružomberok. The objective behind sculptural spatial experiments is to investigate land as a bearer of potential to describe long-term development of a society bound to a specific place. Events and changes associated with the approach to the land and its utilization give us a report on the spirit of the era in chosen time periods. His aims are the contemporary forms of use of alpine landscape, primarily the mountain climbers’ community well known for their readiness to willingly enter bordering life-threatening situation. Thanks to this fact, we can think of climbing society as worth a long term observation. He confront and review the forms of landscape use with the lands history for the past ages. The space illustration of extreme situations and settings from the mountain climbing environment offers the possibility to grasp the space as a text predetermined for recording of important elements in contemporary development of the society that uses the outdoor space. The strategy of typological investigation of the mounting climbing environment is based on formal minimalization of existential experiences, the process interventions and an active climbing experience.
Lucia Luptáková
My work is an ongoing investigation of spaces around me: their character, constitution and the way we are using, experiencing and remembering them. I construct site-specific architectural sculptures/spatial installations. My starting points are physical attributes of a place or an object, context of the situation and here out forthcoming presumptions and routines regarding behaviour and movements. By spatial interventions I create a new scenario and change the spatial experience – by doing this I pinpoint the just mentioned aspects, question and challenge them. I'm looking for a direct connection with the perceiver: the reality of the physical and the emotional experience is penetrating, unavoidable. That is why my artworks are primarily physical constructions/sculptures to be entered and experienced by multiple senses. I manipulate the perception, the mood and the expectation of the user (the public). Through the means of determining the proportions of the work to surrounding space(s) and to a human body, the movement routes within the artwork and the fall of light, I build up suspense.
Daniela Krajčová
Daniela Krajčová (1983, Žilina) is interested in socially based artistic projects. Her process includes the use of experimental documentary strategies, animation, drawing and installation. She uses active participation and investigation and oral history to shape society through a more critical view of Slovakia’s complicated past and present. In addition, she also explores global themes such as immigration issues in France (project The length of their stay, 2008) and in Slovakia (Slovak for Asylum Seekers, 2010). She used the everyday process of drawing in the public space as the strategy of research about the decline of the marketplace in Mexico City due to mafia gang violence (Marketplace Morelos, 2010). She worked with the theme of the slovak nurses of seniors in Austria (Nach Wien, 2012). Intolerance and rasism towards different ethnical minority and its specifity on the local kontext of the region is explored in the work Varuj (2012) about the gipsies in Ilija. She is working on the thesis reflecting the local history about the jewish comunity in three slovak cities, Topoľčany, Banská Štiavnica and Žilina.
Juraj Gábor
Juraj Gábor (born 1985) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (2011). He commenced his studies at the Department of Statue, Object, Installation, and finished at the Inter- and Multimedia Department, Atelier of Spatial Communication with Anton Čierny. Still during his studies he spent two semesters at the Department of Painting and Other Media, Atelier of Ján Berger. He also attended drawing classes of Miloš Bodi, Marian Mudroch and Emöke Vargová. He also took part in video art lessons of Anna Daučíková. His understanding of connections between architecture and life was influenced by unique presentations by architecture theoretician Jan Tabor. Juraj enjoed very much the discussion style of lectures “Art, Politics, Memory” presented by Martin Šimečka and František Šebej. Juraj sees as one of his role models the pedagogical approach of the empathic Ladislav Čarný. Juraj also paid a study visit to Tallin, Estonia, where he graduated from the Department of Sculpture, an essential workshop for him, called Form and Sound with Lukas Kühne and classes of conceptual drawing given by Raoul Kurvitz.
Lucia Tallová
The work of Lucia Tallová represents intimate storytelling, that is narrated through the medium of painting. The author combines two contradictory visual experiences: impersonal product of the industrial society and ethereal dreamy landscape. Depicted objects are emerging from (or blurring into) empty spaces of the canvas and abstract plains of the painting act as a site of a contradictory conflict between minimal invasion and excessive decorating. Lucia Tallová is exploring the power of ornamental structures and decorative fragments, that are made using authentic artistic technique. This technique is based on application of embroideries and crochetings directly onto faces of canvases. Working with decorative laces means, that final works deal with specific visual qualities, but also with the expressing of an inner inexplicit content. Overlaying or superposition of these components determines the sentimentality, sincere nostalgia and naive decorativism of the canvases.
František Demeter
František Demeter was born in 1975 in Trebišov. In the work of Demeter there is an intentional deestetization. The process of creation approves itself outwards, too. The theme becomes the imperfection, undesignedness, incorrect resolution. Breath of turpentine, still wet painting suggests the feeling as if the author would be finishing the work even now, during the exhibition. Clear differentiation between the artistic genres (painting, object, installation) is impossible. It is intentionally turbid, furthermore enriched with the model of participative presence of viewer during activation of the work.
Jaro Varga
Jaro Varga was born in 1982. He is a commentator on creation and destruction. He enjoys seeking out subtle details of what is lost, and systematically looks after what is just being born. Varga explores more than just one field of study. His range of interest encompasses geopolitical topography, the production and archiving of knowledge, social faux pas, and forgotten moments in history. He illustrates the various interconnections between the objects, moments, situations, or places that he finds or consciously seeks out by working with both their form and content. He earned a master’s degree and doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and also participated in student exchanges at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw and Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania in the USA. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad.
Martin Lukáč was born in 1989 in Piešťany .He received his BA between 2009 – 2013 in the studios of Adam Szentpétery and Ján Vasilko at the Arts Faculty of the Technical University of Košice. From 2013 to 2016 he studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of Jiří Černický and Marek Meduna. Still during his studies, he has taken internships in Leipzig at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst with prof. Astrid Klein and Doctor Rudolf Hartmann and at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts where, in the studio Painting 2, he was taught by Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda. He lives and works in Prague. In 2016 he received the Critic’s Award for Young Painters.easy.
Martin Lukáč
Petra Feriancova is a Slovak contemporary artist, writer/editor and curator. She was born in Bratislava, former Czechoslovakia in 1977. She works in the intentions of post-production. The key moment of her work is the conceptualization of her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory as well as an examination of the circumstances under which they are shared. She works mostly with already existing images, texts which she interprets and methodically interchanges. The main aim of this form of manipulation with a pictorial or discursive reference is to provide the spectator with the original affective reaction. Each new realization leans towards a kind of implied connection between the universe of unique personal experience and the impersonal processes of individualization, which is conditioned by civilization, history and culture. Forms, images and vestiges of the fleeting past (family archives, repertoires of historical genres, symbols and discourses) are embraced even in the full awareness that their original meaning has long since degraded or disintegrated, proliferating those areas of indeterminacy which require – even if tentatively, by dint of improvising – being amended and filled with new meaning. Only then, even at the cost of the alienation and distortion of the "original" meaning, may one accept their own version of the world, and by doing so simultaneously open it to others. The process of the socialization or instrumentalization of the subjective, and at the same time, the purely personal interiorization of external contents – the process of mutual alienation as a condition for attributing and renewing meaning – is essentially present as a theme in each and every work by Petra Feriancová, in the form of minor epiphanies, glimpses of understanding, and revelations which cannot be transferred by simple explanation.
Petra Feriancova
Lucia Sceranková has studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, however, she deals exclusively with photography in its traditional form. She lives and works in Prague and London. Sceranková is interested in the relation of the photographic image to reality, the ability of our visual reflection of reality and the possibilities of influencing one by means of the other. She photographs concrete sceneries and interior situations, manually transforming reality so as to create a sense of illusion or fiction. Thus it is not clear what one can see in these images-prints and whether the photograph has been computer-edited or not.
Lucia Sceranková
Martin Vongrej was bonr in 1986. Through visual understanding of the world he cames to certain borders, laws or simple limits of visual conditions and possibilities of perception of man. He started to understand these phenomenons as conscious symbols, by following them He can increase perception to next levels what means that these symbols – limits, bears guide to overtake themself. For instance everything what is repeatable or multiplicable through mirror – visible representation - “ speaks “ in this visual language about that unrepeatable – certain space of thought . Inner quality. Next phenomenon for instance is rotating circular mirror – impossibility of seeing its rotation.
Martin Vongrej
Katarína Hrušková
She kneads elements of comfort into unions of unease. She points out the potency of objects and matter that slip under our radar by way of constant presence and proximity. Spaces we casually inhabit, substances we handle, breathe and allow into our stomachs daily and yet, veiled by familiarity, they elude our awareness. She talks of the latently abject, of omitted properties and textures, histories taken for granted. She creates places of safety to nudge at their borders. She evaluates and navigates the above, because it defines her reality. Her works occupies a comfort zone with a fragile ground where stillness provokes action. She seeks to reveal vulnerabilities; instigate moments of recognition and revelation.
Alex Selmeci, Tomáš Kocka Jusko
Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko are an artistic duo from Slovakia, now based in Prague, working together since 2017. They are focused on object oriented work, using medium of exhibition to create complex environments and intermedia installations. They mainly work with building and technical materials and their specific identity or poetics, dealing with matters of variability, disassembly, reusability or conservation of things in general and of their own works. They are trying to find an aesthetics which could respond to the accumulation of a great amount of already produced materials. In their most recent work Selmeci and Jusko are interested in various possibilities and distortions of time perception, using their own timeline to create objects with fictional past, which is yet to happen. The timeline acts as a cycle of visions and failures and constant overthinking, and follows also the authors' interest in the mutual impact of fiction on reality and vice versa.