View the online publication we released for the 20th anniversary of the painting competition Maľba.
1st place
Mitríková Jarmila/Demjanovič Dávid
Procession with a satellite (from the Slovak space program series)
2011, pyrography, painting with glazes on plywood, 125 x 180 cm
(*1985, Bardejov / *1986, Trebišov)
Dávid Demjanovič studied from 2004 to 2011 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the APK+ studio under Anton Čierny, during his studies he completed several foreign stays. Jarmila Mitríková has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava since 2005, successively with Professor Ivica Vidrová and Professor Ivan Csudai.
The placement of the artist duo in the final is a premiere in the history of the Painting of the Year competition. The female half of the tandem was already featured in last year's final, but their work together, entered into the competition this year, is in many ways different from what we saw. The competition painting is part of a larger series of paintings created with the original technique of pyrography (burning with a soldering iron into wood) combined with painting to which they have been devoted for the third year. This technique together with the ambitious theme creates an unorthodox and appealing combination. The motifs from fictional Slovak history are complemented by emblematic architectural realities (Jurkovič's cable car station) and reinforced by archetypal compositional schemes (the procession) in such a way that the ambition to create a historical composition, a genre that was absent in poor Slovak art, was evident The wood-burning technique itself is a traditional technique for creating amateur souvenirs that take postcard themes of famous cities as their motifs. It is the contrast between the ambitious subject and the technique that makes this painting one of the favourites of the final, all the more so because the work has nothing in common with traditional painting, but it transcends its boundaries.
(The text is from the catalogue for the competition Painting 2011, A. Kusá)
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