White & Weiss Gallery is opening an exhibition of one of the most prominent contemporary artists, Martin Gerboc (1971) on 20 March 2018. There are no beautiful bodies and graceful faces in Gerboc´s works but absence of beauty does not mean we witness ugliness. The curator of this exhibition, Miroslav Marcelli, a philosopher, says about his works: “Let´s take a look at these figures … with a frozen tear on his face as witness to weeping that brings no relief but only deepens the damnation of the chosen ones. (…)the features of the individual figures blend into sort of a collective body, assembled from intertwined limbs, naked trunks and grinning faces with signs of torment and eeriness, ecstasy and agony, side by side, all as an expression of a gargoyle monster of a crowd, everything in raging motion. It may be a wild dance, or a carnival parade, or a carnival transformed into a certain form of dance macabre. (…)No doubt these creatures are repulsive by their appearance, with their bodies marked by mutilation, their smiles turned into grins and their happiness frozen in convulsion. (…) There is a lot of violence in his pictures, evil and expectation of death; but the pictures represent a unique perspective on the contemporary world, the world with no embellishments that is obscene, sleazy and perverted.”

Martin Gerboc graduated from the Faculty of Visual Arts in Bratislava (1990-1996; PhD studies in 2001-2004); he also studied at the University of Pennsylvania in USA and College of Danish Design in Denmark. He went to several residential stays in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Gerboc´s works has seized the attention of international curators and he has exhibited with such outstanding world-class artists like Jack and Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst, Cindy Shermann, Jeff Koons, Joel Peter-Witkin and others at Dekadence Now! (exhibition held in Prague, Rudolfinum Gallery 2010-2011), Motýlí efekt/Butterfly Effect (Prague, Rudolfínum Gallery, 2013), Maľba po maľbe/Painting after Painting  (Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery, 2010), Iconoclasme. La Société du Spectacle (Paris, JAS Gallery, 2011), SCOPE art-fair (Basel, 2014) and others.

Gerboc  is an author of several published books of philosophical essays and essays on painting (Myslením ku kríze/Through Thinking to Crisis; Nihilizmus je pragmatizmus/Nihilism is Pragmatism, 1998; Dôverovať unavuje/Trusting is Tiring, 2001; Kvapky krvi/Drops of Blood; Štruktúry sadomasochizmu/The Structures of Sado-Masochism, 2005; Maľba ako politický akt neototalizmu/Painting as a Political Act of Neo-totalitarianism 2006; Saatchiho předsíň/Saatchi´s Lobby; Texty o současnosti v malbě/Texts on Current Painting, 2010; and Tohle není poesie! Zhroucení citů/This is not Poetry! The Collapse of Emotions, 2016).

Gerboc presents himself not only as a painter but also as a curator and theorist, deliberating about contemporary painting in today´s world. He curated various exhibitions both nationally and internationally, made various film projects and as an assistant-director he participated in making several movies for the band The Last Days of Jesus, creating several music video clips.

In 2013, an extensive monography on Gerboc was published in a Prague publishing house Arbor composed by Otto M. Urban, Miroslav Marcelli, and Petr Vaňous: Martin Gerboc. Une Saison en Enfer.

The gallery’s exhibition program in 2018 has received support from the Fund for Art.