Current Exhibition – Three times Čutek

Three Times Čutek exhibition represents almost seventy years of the creative effort of three generations of the Čutek family of sculptors in the selection of works from the most significant periods of their creation; it also illustrates their inter-generational relationships.

The concept of the exhibition and the publication is naturally divided into three parts according to individual authors in the chronological sequence of their creative paths. The curator of the exhibition, Karol Maliňák, includes individual works and groups of works into time relations in the period of almost seventy years of three generations of artists’ creations; he clarifies the period and conditions or situations in which individual works or concepts were created and developed. He outlines basic inspirations, motions for creation or life philosophies and attitudes, and sources on which the creations of individual authors were based. The exhibition and the publication will especially please those interested in the iconic 1960s and the search for a universal, archetypal, all-embracing form in relation to the national tradition, in the artwork of Mikuláš Galanda´s Group that represented the most progressive tendencies of the then-current art in Slovakia and which is now counted among the most famous Slovak art, but also those interested in playful, clean and attractive works that pursue the aesthetic values of the material used (wood and metal) with specific humour, a touch of nostalgia, a bit of irony, but also love of and esteem for people and life.

The exhibition and the publication also introduce significant works of authors from the Nedbalka Gallery collection.

Three Times Čutek  exhibition represents the best from the creative effort of the Čutek family of sculptors; it also illustrates their inter-generational relationships. The basis of  Anton Čutek’s exhibition collection of are plastic works from the 1960s when his individual author´s language and its cultivation were shaped, when he formulated the principles on which he built his life-work, when he was creating dynamic relations between the form and space so that the form was not a foreign element in space, accepted only conditionally, but so that the space interferes in the creation of a series of live experiments between full and empty (inserted) volumes.

The sculpting creation of his son Juraj Čutek is based on a poetic view, amazement of technology and civilization from the turn and the start of the 20^th century – mainly by the breakthrough period of the automotive industry, aviation and avionics, rail transport, the world of races and technical records, but also literature, music, theatre and the circus, the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and others. It is a defence of dignity, creativity, wit, human inventiveness, the spirit of exploration, and creative and human courage. Juraj Čutek builds bridges between the stages of the human being, supported by his characteristic humour and a very humane, friendly, authentic and true attitude.

Max Čutek lives the life of a modern man to whom life offers a number of opportunities and he selects which one he will use. He has spent a certain amount of time in Ireland, he cooperates in restoration projects where he uses the skills which he has acquired in his family sculpting studio, he looks after himself, paints, creates sculptures or other works rather for pleasure than as a life programme, he likes freedom and enjoys it in the true sense of the word. The intellectual contents of Max´s missions reflect the author´s world and creative philosophy. His path is open; time will show in which direction he will advance his family tradition in the future.