Fero Liptak exhibition

From September 3 to December 7, Danubiana will present another exhibition by Fero Lipták entitled Name, City, Animal, Thing.

Let’s start with a name. Let’s start with the name Lipták. Let’s assume that it is a proper name, moreover, composed of two words, Fero and Lipták. This already gives a kind of a picture. Actually quite accurate. The name Fero Lipták is associated with a stylized red character set in domestic, often humorous scenes with an easily recognizable handwriting.

This is where the charm of the name lies. Somehow we already know in advance what to expect. Names help us to face the unforeseen, they provide security. The problem arises, however, when the certainty of a name becomes too narrow. The handwriting goes too deep and begins to restrict, to behave prescriptively. Fortunately, any norm is inherently unstable. It teeters on the edge of what is permissible and, through its rigidity, provokes all those possibilities that remain unfulfilled. The game, too, has its norm.

For example, the game Name, the city beast thing. One of the players mentally chops off the alphabet, and the other stops this string of unspoken syllables with the command “stop”, so that they both then search for names, cities, animals and things beginning with the letter drawn. A… stop. Only! Who among us hasn’t tried tapping out an unreadable alphabet at a horrendously slow, or conversely, breakneck pace? Or didn’t you invent the letter at the instruction “stop” straight away? The point is not to abolish the norm altogether, that would then be no game, only to escape it by a side exit. And so Lipták also escapes from the portentousness of his name and introduces new drawing techniques and motifs of the city into his characteristic painting.

So the city as a space of freedom. After all, cities are designed for life. They have their residential districts, industrial centres, transport hubs and leisure zones. One can wander through them and discover more and more nooks and crannies seemingly without end. But the limitlessness of Liptak’s cities is something strange. The form into which the conglomerates of buildings are composed is not dictated by the norm, but it is exuberant, growing unpredictably in all directions. Its Menhentens, Lords “Elaks” and Developers seem to have gone wild in the compulsive movement of accretion. More blocks, more buildings, more floors, more tracts… What should have been freedom has turned into a brimming urgency. Shape is no longer imposed from without, it is conditioned from within, in an effort to relieve the unrelenting pressure, the command of More! And this architecture of excess does not bypass Liptak’s figure.

He transforms it into one of his urban zones, because the principle from which it grows is deeply human. Is there any freedom left in such a world?

Lipták seeks it in the imagination, in the world of fantasy animals and things. Where flying stumps hover in the air, where rabbits take a cleansing bath in the shower and strange islands float above our heads, perhaps we can be truly free. We weave something unexpected into the norm and urgency of the play. For example, the letter ψ (dog), coming from a different alphabetical string, a different order of reality. And we feel a whiff of freedom. But our enchantment is soon broken by the realisation that the form of these surreal images is, after all, somehow familiar to us. Lessoned by previous experience, and therefore conditioned.

So what? Do we come to terms with the fact that there is no escape from the game, both the social one and the children’s one called Name, City, Animal, Thing (as long as we are players, or even a function of the game itself)? Probably yes. Only that there would… The three dots here open up a space we barely remember. A pre-normative space, when we were still more quality than name. The space of childhood. Lipták returns to it with a naive drawing in a simple line, supplemented with scraps and fragments of found materials. Tiny shapes of buildings, animals and things seem to be just making their way out of non-existence. They are clumsy, skeletal, “like the first time a horse stands up.” There is, however, a certain awareness in that clumsiness. Impersonal, elemental, pre-natal. Who knows, maybe if we didn’t want to translate it into our rules of the game, a whole different world would grow out of it. A new, unknown, and yet our own.

Biography

František Lipták was born in 1962. He graduated from the Secondary School of Arts and Industry in Košice and the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, majoring in stage production, under the guidance of prof. Ladislav Vychodil. Since 1986 he has worked in almost all theatres in Slovakia, as well as in theatres in the Czech Republic and Poland. He is a co-founder of Teatro Tatro theatre company. Over the last 40 years he has created more than 120 productions. Many of them have been awarded at national and international festivals. Since 1991 he has also been working in film. As an architect and designer he participated in the profile Slovak films of the nineties. He has received 4 nominations, including 2 ČFTA Czech Lion awards. ASFK awarded him the prize for his contribution to Slovak cinematography. His artistic work includes painting, graphics, illustration and poster design. So far he has had more than 40 solo and many collective exhibitions at home and abroad.

Curator Slavka Liptáková

Location: Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Čunovo, Slovakia

Date: from  03. 09. 2025 – 07. 12. 2025

Opening hours:

Monday – closed
Tuesday – Sunday from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Entrance fee:

Adults – 12 €
Family (2 adults and 2 students) – 25 €
Pensioners (over 62 years old) – 6 €
Students – 6 €
Children (under 6 years old) – Free
Members of the Danubiana Club – Free
Disabled persons, persons over 75 years old – Free

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