Michal Mráz exhibition

Since 2013 Michal Mráz has profiled himself as a distinctive painter of melancholic paintings with elements of hybrid poetics and critical social subtext. The starting point of his work can be found in the positions of street art resistance. The critical charge embedded in raw protest has been sophisticatedly drawn in and elaborated by the artist into a new form of a rich and varied pictorial constitution. The speed and adrenaline of street art activities have been replaced by concentrated work in the studio.

The image was transformed into a subversive matrix of time-lapse compression, in which plot layers overlap and hallucinate. From the very beginning, the entire illusory space of the painting is unmasked by the artist and deliberately shown as an artificially arranged, multidimensional situation. All elements of the composition, including the figures, are taken-over phenomena of the reproduced world of forms. In order to underline this distant plane of the work, Mráz chooses retro sources representing a long “dead” lifestyle.

The reference to transience, death and vanitas creates a narrative of chimera. Here we delve into the temporally remote nooks, folds and labyrinths of a newly arranged past that references the loss of something essential. Human experience here is shattered and loses its binding contours. The past is transformed into a melting mirror image of hidden events and their pseudo-machinists. What the artist painterly presents here touches upon the fundamental theme of the present, which is the problem of distorted representation, disinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, but also the disconnection between the inner and outer world of experience. Despite the visuality of the past, Frost comes to an insistent sense of the present.

The exhibition entitled TERROR refers by its title to the limited space of human freedom. The artist’s distant gaze traces the flip side of a retouched world of dreams and needs that define the fragile boundaries of civilization. It deconstructs the canon of consumerist happiness.

Petr Vaňous, curator of the exhibition

Despite studying sculpture (Prof. Meliša and Doc. Hoffstädter’s studio) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, painting eventually became his primary medium of expression. In the beginning, his street art activities were mainly responsible for the current form of hybrid painting. It was this “street style” of rebellion, of expressing himself to the current state of the world, that he was able to translate into a distinctive black and white painting also in a wider Central European context. He has exhibited mainly abroad: Galerie Olivier Waltman – Paris 2021, Kirk Gallery – Aalborg, 2020, ALB Gallery – Paris, 2016. Since 2017, he has been invited annually to Art Miami, USA, Art Herning, Denmark, Urban Art Fair, Paris, France. In 2013 he was a finalist in the Saatchi Online Showdown and in 2012 he was nominated for the Artaq Urban Art Award. His works are included in many important collections, such as the Lettenmayer collection. He is represented abroad by Galerie Olivier Waltman and in Slovakia by Galerie Čin Čin.

Location: Danubiana, Čunovo, Bratislava
Date: from 04.11.2023 – 10.12.2023
Start: 10:00 – 18:00
Admission:
Adults – 10 €
Family (2 adults and 2 students) – 20 €
Pensioners (over 62 years old) – 5 €
Students – 5 €
Children (under 6 years old) – Free
Danubiana Club Members – Free
Disabled persons, persons over 75 years of age – Free

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