Curator: Vladimír Beskid

The project titled Natural Objects showcases two young female and one male artist from the strong Košice art scene. All three have graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the Technical University of Košice and they continue to live and work there. Representing one generation with strong local affiliation, they examine landscape, nature, natural objects and fossils. While painting is the dominant medium of Dováľová and Vrancová, Machciník embraces 3D creations and explores natural objects.

Both female artists intentionally opt for a visual language on the border between figurative expression and abstraction. Styled landscapes, clean areas and natural fragments are typical for both of them. The colourful composition of objects and greenery, freely levitating in the flat space of paintings (Nature 1,3; 2020), sometimes side by side with weird engines, time machines or apparatuses (Mechanism, 2016; Village 3, 2020) are dominant in the works of Denisa Dováľová. It is a visual playground with frozen harmony, timelessness or universal order expressed in spite of the presence of scattered or sharp-edged forms contained in the small interior of a painting (Mechanism 2, 2016; Phi, 2019).

Monika Germuška Vrancová prefers to model dark, romantic canvases where details of organic forms and crystals (RNA without a Sign of Life I – II, 2020); or the world of mysterious special sequences, psychological nocturnal atmosphere with stars (Constellation of Death, 2019; Solar Model, 2021) come to the forefront. Her paintings resurrect velvet darkness along with gothic-like countries under a spell with long shadows, beak skulls, knives and moon shine. Her artwork is an ecological topography of both countries and minds where corals, trees, crystal threads or tissues form a new transitive space of anxiety, nostalgia and loneliness, hand in hand with a warning dystopic undertone of a devastated country (Greenhouse, 2021; Experiments with Cultivation 1 – 2, 2022).

Michal Machciník is a collector and researcher, combiner and archaeological stalker. Presenting a module of post-classicist science from his ventures around the country, he creates a particular series of objects, such as Homage to Woodpecker that combine castings of cavities created by a woodpecker with PUR, bones, antlers, cartridges and the like (Time Creating Cavity A – D, 2022). Likewise, he presents Reliefs for Latour where he combines old technical and geometrical drawings with subfossil wood, bones, plastic toys, cones, escallops, ginger and much more (Tvrdomer Rockwell, Subfossil Twist; both 2021 – 22). Tiny sculptures (created in cooperation with the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice) combine rusty metal constructions, discovered bones, cavities made by woodpeckers (Dromedary Camel, 2021 – 22; Jesuit in Amazonia, 2022). Machciník thus brings to life the world of natural objects, creating new, peerless artefacts, just like in his former cabinets of wanders (His last exhibition was titled Wunderkammer, MVL Košice 2020).

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava and was supported from public funds by Fond na podporu umenia.