The fine art of Miloš Alexander Bazovský (1899 – 1968) as one of the founders of modern Slovak painting has been introduced in many exhibitions and publications. However, Bazovský in the role of a photographer will have his first solo exhibition on the grounds of SNG.
As a photographing visual artist, he had been preceded by some artists in Slovakia (Ladislav Mednyánszky, Gustáv Mallý), but he was the first who succeeded at being a modern artist and modern photographer at the same time. He used a photographic camera (mostly in the '30s – ‘40s of the 20th century) instead of a sketch book; with it, he built a visual database of motifs that later emerged in his works of art. He simply used a camera as one of many means of visual art and composed directly in his camera’s viewfinder. Owing to that, there are several topical and composition parallels between his shots and some of his drawings and paintings.
Bazovský was interested in not only traditional rural topics – in this area, he was somehow rougher and a more documentarist counterpart to Karol Plicka, he also focused on a variety of manifestations of modern life style: sport, tourism, travelling. He often portrayed his friends, perhaps mostly the artist with a tragic destiny — Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan.
Bazovský never published his photographs, yet, in the SNG Archive of Fine Art, there is a quite extensive collection of negatives that became a foundation for the upcoming exhibition.