Creativity and revolution is an exhibition dedicated to revolutionary experience and the avant-garde aesthetics based on short-lived Republic of Councils and its 100th anniversary which we are currently commemorating. The concept of the exhibition takes into account the current historical moment and the new generation that lives its life without any revolutionary experience and under pressure to be creative. The exhibition project focuses on the dialectic relationship between revolution and creativity.
In 2011, curator Juliet Kinchin prepared the exhibition Seeing Red: Hungarian Revolutionary Poster, 1919 in MoMa, New York, and then in Mumok, Vienna, where she presented a new collection of posters with dynamic expressive figuration from the most important Hungarian artists actively involved in the socialist revolutionary movement, including Alexander Bortnyik. The author, moving between the avant-garde scenes in Budapest and Berlin, created a series of drawings in the first half of the 1920s during his stay in Košice, which will be presented at the exhibition.
Like the early communist movement in Slovakia, the early avant-garde on our territory is based on the Hungarian avant-garde. The cross-sectional exhibition from the collections of Slovak galleries focuses on graphics, drawing and photography – progressive genres of avant-garde art, from expressionism to early socialist realism and to early social-documentary photography (Bauer, Bortnyik, Krón, Protopopov).
The exhibition focuses on the dialectic relationship between the collective body and the new class consciousness, between history, the new left-wing theory and (artistic) practice. The presented works will be interconnected and recontextualized by the intervention of the young graphic artist Pavol Červeniak, who follows the aesthetics of the early revolutionary poster in a critical and creative way.
Ivana Komanická
