View the online publication we released for the 20th anniversary of the painting competition Maľba.
2nd place
Kollárik Samuel
We were born upside down
2022, oil, acrylic and spray on canvas, 185 x 130 cm
(* 1992, Bojnice)
2019 – 2021, studied at FU OSU Ostrava, Painting IV Studio led by Mark Meduna and Petr Dub; previously, 2015 – 2018, at AVU Prague in the Painting Studio of Prof. Martin Mainer. 2012 – 2015, studied at FU Ostrava University in the Free Graphic Art Studio led by M. Sibinský, and in parallel during 2013 – 2014 he completed a study stay at ASP im. Jana Matejki, in Krakow, Poland.
Samuel Kollárik, a debutant in the competition, presents a clearly anchored and defined artistic programme. Given that in recent years artists have somewhat "preferentially" addressed, and continue to address, "women’s issues", it is interesting and also necessary to keep in view an opposite pole that is today less topical, but remains important. Furthermore, Kollárik takes a complex approach to his chosen theme – for him, form and content are in symbiosis, and he addresses this range of issues with a long-term commitment and emphatically. A powerful moment in his painting is the figural work and the rich narrative. A further strong suit is his direct contact with the Czech milieu, from which he distils a visual on the frontier of grotesque, and even absurdity.
His final entry We were born upside down/Narodili sme sa dole hlavou (2022) documents this clearly. Kollárik surprisingly simulates an unexpected archetype: he paints a skinhead as a type of antihero. The skinhead’s overcultivated masculinity is turned head down. A headstand suddenly offers us another view of the situation; it provides a changed perspective. Kollárik shows his protagonist placed the other way round, set in a fictive "East European" cast-concrete milieu, which is made strange by nebulous levitating attributes. He shows how to paint an antihero: how to avoid the adoring pose of the character raised up in space. In the artist’s own words: "Disorientation counts for more than orientation. Accepted as a principle of painting, it determines the symbolic reference fields; a point of collocation is maleness and its stereotypes and limits. It is splintered by mass, rationality, knowledge and tenderness. The multiplicity of formal approaches is a result of examining the medium and the substance of paint, with an appeal to the symbol and its purport, often with an intentional distance and humour. The theme tends towards a knowledge of masculinity as a phenomenon, from a personal subjective standpoint."
(The text is from the catalogue for the competition Painting 2022, N. Gažovičová)
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