CZ - SK - Contemporary young painting

CZ – SK
Contemporary young painting
Wannieck Gallery, Brno | 19. 9. 2008–5. 4. 2009
Curator: Richard Adam

Focus on paintings of young, beginning artists is one of the main collection-building principles pursued by Wannieck Gallery.
This is quite understandable: in most cases, talent for art is revealed at college already and compiling comprehensive collections
of individual authors or the whole generations is as easy as good a notion of their protagonists’ work ca be obtained beginning
with time they were students. It is only natural that such interest has a counter-effect, too, often motivating artists to develop
their talents in further work.
Personal visits and meetings with visual artists of the two close nations, Czechs and Slovaks, gradually gave rise to a feeling
that a selection of works of artists from the “neighbouring states” should be presented to the art-loving public. Vladimír Beskid
was the curator of last year’s exhibition of Slovak art PitoreSka at Wannieck Gallery, and this year he has made a representative
selection of contemporary Czech painting from the collections of Wannieck Gallery and from galleries in Trnava and Nitra.
Therefore we believe to be quite logical that the third exhibition, this time again in the venues of Wannieck Gallery, is not a
mere show of works made in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but rather and primarily a sort of comparison of generationally
conditioned painting production of the two nations.
Conceptual painting in the broad sense of the word, modified realistic trends or, for instance, the influence of street art and
graffiti: all these and many other modalities of painting are represented at the exhibition. We did not adhere to any conceptual
or other criteria or limitations in choosing the painters. Artistic quality was the decisive factor. On the other hand, we are
aware that especially in the case of younger artists (and sometimes students) the choice is not based on long-term results
but rather on the quality of a specific piece of art. In a few years’ time, the status of the young or, rather, the oncoming generation
may appear in a different light, but this is a fact which must be always taken into account in designing this type of exhibition.
The fact that not all artists who are worth of interest within the given generation have been included does not mean, by any
means, a negation of their quality.
As for the artists, the principal criterion for their inclusion and, as a matter of fact, “acknowledgement” of their work was, as
always, a broader knowledge of their paintings and of the circumstances of their creation.
Keeping that in mind, we tried to respect and reflect certain differences, for instance the regional ones, which in our view,
are quite marked, especially in Slovakia (e.g., on the one hand, the Košice circle represented by Blažo, Vasilko, Sirka, Králik,
and on the other hand the graduates from Ivan Csudiai’s studio at the School of Visual Arts in Bratislava, i.e. Šille, Baffi, Czinege
and Černušák).
And there was yet another objective which played an important role in conceiving the Slovak part of the exhibition. Slovak
artists do not exhibit their works in the Czech Republic so often as it may seem – the reason why we have tried to show their
production covering a wider period of time.