Koloman Sokol 1968-1993
I am not interested in money, politics,
fame or comfortable life.
My aim has always been the life framed in purity.
Whether I will reach it? I do not know.
My life was cast of lead.
1968
The end of the sixties marked the beginning of the last creative phase in the oeuvre of Koloman Sokol, a significant figure of Slovak fine art whose artistic and humanistic legacy reached far beyond the borders of Slovakia. In this period, Sokol´s thinking and style significantly changed. He no longer aspired to a formal perfection, as if he lost interest in morphology, composition or space. He turned his attention to the atmosphere, the depiction of crucial moments and the state of mind. Eighteen works from the Nedbalka Gallery´s collection executed between 1968 and 1993 represent the selection of the artist´s best works from this creative period.
Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.
Koloman Sokol
Koloman Sokol was born in 1902 in Liptovský Mikuláš. He met Dr. Mathém, who started studying at the private school of Eugen Krone in Košice . Here he met for the first time with fine arts. Later he studied at the private school of Gustav Malý in Bratislava . He also studied art in Prague and in Paris . He received an offer from the Mexican Ministry of Culture and Education and left to study fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico , where he founded the Graphics Department. Although he achieved great success in Mexico. He moved to New York in 1941, because of the health of his wife, Lydia. After the war, he returned to Slovakia , but he had long since left his home in 1948 . He has been a member of the Union of Mexican Graphic Artists and has lived in Arizona for the last decade . At the end of his life, he gave 48 of his paintings to Slovakia, which later became the Foundation of the Koloman Sokol Center in Liptovsky Mikulas. He died 12.1.2003. In spite of his great success, he stayed until the end of his life with a modest man seeking his truth.
Magical Moments
The exhibition of photographs by Peter Paško, Palo Luka, Peter Nižňanský and Julo Nagy, titled “Magical Moments”, is documentation of photo trips to almost all continents made between 2006 and 2016.
Painting 2021
Twenty finalists, from which three winners will emerge in the autumn, have been carefully selected by the jury.
Viera Kraicová – Paintings 1962 – 1994
The exhibition presents the artist´s painting experiments hovering on the border of abstraction and figuration, her spontaneous gestural paintings, imaginative figurative works and returns to colour patch as a crucial means of expression and intermediary of emotional expression. There are also represented classical genres like still life or portrait as well as records of the artist´s spontaneous painting that, in a way, always followed the contours of a figural basis.
Renata & Marek Ormandík – Ravens, Busts and Flowers
The present exhibition is a result of common life, existence, efforts and creativity of Renata and Marek: painting, crocheting, drawing, knitting, thinking, inspiring one another.
Painting 2020
The VUB Foundation has a long history of supporting the visual arts. Its best-known activity is the prestigious and unique art competition Maľba (Painting) – The VUB Foundation award for paintings by young artists, which it is has run since 2006. The competition’s mission is to support the work of young artists, to contribute to its promotion, to improve and cultivate the art of painting, to raise the public profile of this art and to help young artists begin their careers in the arts.
Ferdinand Hložník – Exploring Identity Through Art
Ferdinand Hložník is among the most significant figures in the Slovak modern art.
Andrej Barčík – Axis Crossing the Horizon
Barčík focused on painting, drawing, lithograph, and used waste paper from printing works. He combined things, leaving nothing to chance.
The competition Painting – The VUB Foundation
The competition Painting – The VUB Foundation award for paintings by young artists has fulfilled its mission, which is to promote the most gifted professional painters in Slovakia and raise the public awareness of the visual art, for fourteen years.