Juraj Gábor: Pospícháš-li, pak tam nikdy nedorazíš

2. 5. - 27. 5. 2017
Curator: Lenka Sýkorová
Photo: Markéta Bendová

Slovak artist Juraj  Gábor is a graduate of the Studio of Spatial Communication+ of Anton Čierný at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava. During his studies, he completed an internship at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. In 2012 he became the laureate of the Igor Kalný Prize of the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín and last year was a finalist of the Oskár Čepan Prize. His work is associated with the medium of drawing which he uses to transcribe the material and spiritual world. In his creative process, he works with drawing as an initial art technique for capturing the technical transcription of space, but also as with a recording medium for epitomizing the moment. He is also an artist who studies spiritual and philosophical texts and is engaged in the research of the history of art. For example, in his monumental work Visual Pyramids produced in 2015 in the Súlov Mountains in Slovakia, he created in the form of an object in the landscape a foundation of the Renaissance theory of vision defined by Leon Battista Alberti. This site-specific installation represents the pinnacle of the author’s long-term interest through which he opens the issues of the contextualisation of the vision and perception of images. Juraj Gábor unveils the way an image appears in the mind and at a specific time and space, and how it can later be perceived in a gallery. Work in a gallery room is not alien to him. His portfolio of exhibited work contains projects which functioned on the principle of intervention in gallery collections in the sense of predefining the interpretation of an artwork and the offer of a further way of its visualisation. Apart from the basic technique of drawing, other media are also expressed in the form of performance, video, object and installation.

In the Klamovka Altán Juraj Gábor attempted to fulfil the two specific things which the gallery offers. In the first step, he measured the gallery room and redrew it in axonometry into a technical drawing as part of some sort of initiation ritual when he studied in detail the framework of his creative gesture in the process of the exhibition’s duration. In the second step, he entered a small “nondescript” white room and created a relocated workplace here – a temporary studio for daily creative work. He also brought in a pantograph which still bears traces of use by his father and brother. The traces of drawing pins became his starting point for exploring the history of material which, at first glance, is not apparent, but inconsistent and focused regularly recurrent work offers room for three-dimensional drawing when the author will insert a half millimetre to 6-centimetre long graphite refills from a technical pencil in the places of the punctures. Juraj Gábor, as an artist, will, therefore, become the inhabitant of the Klamovka Altán and park during the exhibition. In this performance gesture, he will attempt to epitomize the moment.

Lenka Sýkorová