Opening: 28 October 2026, 6:00 pm
Curator: Lucia Gavulová
Exhibition period: 29 October 2026 – 28 February 2027
Space C, Hlavná 27, Košice
The exhibition project The Secret of Air presents a selection of works by Košice-based visual artist Peter Sceranka (16 October 1955 – 26 March 1999), whose significance extends beyond the region and who remains an underappreciated figure in the context of exhibition presentations of Slovak art. The exhibition at the East Slovak Gallery in Košice is not a monographic survey of the artist’s work, but rather a curatorial selection focusing primarily on his practice as a draughtsman, painter, and collage artist.
The Secret of Air is the title of a 1994 drawing by Sceranka that embodies several characteristics of his work from this period: swirling structures of dots and lines, “thrown down” in pencil, dynamically expand across the entire surface of the paper. At this time, drawing became one of Sceranka’s dominant media. He created unique, free-flowing large-format compositions that represent a distinctive strand of Slovak drawing of the 1990s. In the context of the exhibition, secret can be understood as a state of that which remains hidden, inaccessible, or unknown. In his drawings from this period, Sceranka does not reproduce the optically perceived world, but instead seeks to move beneath the surface of the visible and capture processes that resist optical perception.
Peter Sceranka (1955, Košice – 1999, Košice) was a Slovak sculptor, draughtsman, and painter. From 1976 to 1981, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of figurative sculpture. Although his artistic education was rooted in sculpture, drawing became an increasingly significant and ultimately defining part of his practice. He explored figurative motifs, the head, and the human body, gradually transforming them into loose gestural, spatial, and abstract structures. His large-format drawings from the 1990s are particularly characteristic, exploring the possibilities of line, volume, movement, and inner space. In 1992, he was awarded first prize for drawing at the International Biennial of Art in Barcelona. He lived and worked in Košice, where he died prematurely. His work represents a distinctive and still insufficiently acknowledged strand of Slovak art of the final decades of the 20th century.
