Exhibition opening with an introduction by the curator: 29 June 2021 at 18:00
Exhibition duration: 30 June 2021 – 12 September 2021
Curators: Zuzana Bodnárová and Svätopluk Mikyta
Exhibition Space C, 27 Hlavná Street, Košice
The exhibition Imrich Vanek: Private and Public presents possible reflections and interpretations of a rich artistic life and its work, anchored in private as well as public space or an ever-changing social climate. Curators Zuzana Bodnárová and Svätopluk Mikyta browsed through the unprocessed estate of the artist Imrich Vanek. They intuitively chose ceramic pictures, porcelain, notes on the production, personal and documentary photographs, sketches and plaster models of reliefs known from the façades of department stores. By selecting works set in architecture, modelling the interior of an apartment, they try to direct the visitor to think about the value of lifelong creation, concluded by the artist’s experience of retirement.
Imrich Vanek (1931 – 2015) was a Slovak visual artist and sculptor working mainly in the medium of ceramics. Modelling from the clay became a form of art therapy for 20-year-old Vanek, who suffered a severe railway accident. This interest unexpectedly grew into a more profound fascination and led him to apply to an art academy. Vanek studied at the Studio of Ceramics and Porcelain of Prof. Otto Eckert at Prague's Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. One of his classmates was Mária Bartuszová. After his studies in Prague, the young artist worked at the ceramics factory in Rakovník, which produces tiles. From the second half of the 1960s, he had created numerous large-format ceramic walls, reliefs and pictures, which he made in cooperation with architects thanks to the so-called Article 5. This provision introduced the obligation to reserve part of the budget for public constructions and use it to create new works of art to be installed in architecture. After 1989, the artist replaced his large-format work with equally intense chamber sculpture, which he created in his studio in Koliba in Bratislava.
Organised by Banská St a nica Contemporary with public funding from the Art Support Fund.
