When I met two years ago New York print dealer Marvin Bolotsky and learned about his vast collection of Central and Eastern European prints, I didn’t hesitate to offer a collaboration to exhibit Czech and Slovak prints at the BBLA Gallery. In January, we mounted an exhibition entitled “Celebrating Print: Masters of Czech and Slovak Printmaking” presenting at BBLA Gallery on Upper East Side unbelievable number of 58 works by 27 Czech and Slovak artists. Crème de la Crème.
The two months of preparation (on the photo, Marvin frames Peter Klucik’s etching for the exhibition) gave me a wonderful opportunity to examine each and every one of the featured works (a friend of mine, joking, compared me to Cornelius Gurlitt for whom the artworks inherited from his father, an exuberant Nazi-era art dealer, meant the whole world, enjoying them in secrecy day and night – well, I returned all the prints back to Marvin). Being a printmaker myself, I was intrigued by the remarkable command of technique and diversity of narrative centered on human figure. And I was not alone in my admiration.
Together with New York Master Printer Vijay Kumar, my dear friend who introduced me to the world of intaglio, we took our time to explore the complexities of some of the presented works, such as Slovak artist Albin Brunovsky’s Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart (showed on the photo). Luckily, Vijay always carries his magnifying glass to check all the nuances of prints, the variety of lines, dots and marks the artist used to create this dense background with an infinite number of fantastic characters.
When curating this exhibition, I was particularly interested in the narrative – visual representation of events from the past or expressions of notions about the absurdity of the world, politics and human nature. Some works offered psychological self-examination, particularly attractive in surreal compositions questioning our understanding of the world. I certainly felt for the colorful lithographs from the 1970s (Morning, or One Problem, To Be Correctly Placed in the Space) by Slovak artist Vladimir Gazovic, phenomenal for the combination of color washes and ink-pen-like lines (known as scratch lithograph when lines are inscribed into the stone, then printed in a manner similar to intaglio).
Gazovic’s imaginative world is composed of human beings often with inherent physical flows, animals and bizarre objects, in juxtaposed relationships questioning our understanding of reality. I was very pleased to meet a young man, new to print collecting, who shared my sensibility to surreal and bizarre and acquired this very rare lithograph by Vladimir Gazovic entitled At the Sprint of Life from 1970s (the photo above features detail from the lithograph).
Katerina Kyselica | kadsny.PRINT 