Location. As they state at the official website Galerie SPZ is an independent venue for contemporary art by new and more established artists. The project was launched as a curatorial initiative by Lukáš Machalický and Robert Šalanda. Galerie SPZ’s agenda is defined by experimentation and confrontation. Each featured artist can choose a guest. In addition to their annual exhibition program SPZ also has a cycle for the flagpole outside the gallery (every 3 months an artist is selected to produce a large-format flag that will hang over the entrance).
Curator. Piotr Sikora
Artist. Martin Lukáč is a young Slovak artist who got his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and is mostly known for his expressive abstract mixed media paintings and series of paper drawings both abstract and figurative.
Personal Opinion. This small exhibition has a value to those who enjoy abstract yet original art as works of Martin Lukáč have a special aura of the young abstraction still seeking for the form.
The curatorial statement for this exhibition raises a question of the zombie formalism and its relevance in the context of the contemporary art where the revolutionary ideas of the avant-garde have been raped by the narrow-minded consumerism .
This problem is not something new to the art as every game changing and shocking artistic invention has over time lost its edge as the limits of creativity were pushed further by yet another progressive artist: there always is a moment when art enters an everyday space and the wider the communication channels, the more art enters into people’s houses on the notebook prints, wallpapers, sofa cushions, clothes all treated as something visually pleasant with almost zero respect to its cultural value. As it has been pointed out in one of the closing presentations of the exhibition we might as well expect zombie conceptualism as the next wave of mass ignorance signs of which are already showing.
The case of abstract art is also complicated by the fact that wide culturally uneducated masses see it as something inferior to the preceding and well-known works of art that strike a spectator by technique and complexity — a point of view on art that surprisingly still exists but truly belongs somewhere back in the end of the 19th century. If such attitude still has a place to be it can only mean that the revolution in art still has to conquer masses of conservative minds who are yet not ready to accept neither modern nor postmodern perspectives. For all the people on the side of abstract art it means that abstraction is no less relevant now than it was a hundred years ago and anyone has a right to explore this area advocating the freedom of creativity.
reshe_prg_artmap 