The exhibition of Laco Teren (born in 1960 in Bratislava) at the Slovak National Gallery will present the key points of his artistic program and comprehensively capture his unique artistic and genuinely "versatile" personality.
He was one of the leading figures of the post-Modernist generation, which in the mid-1980s appeared on the art scene with a program of Neo-Expressive painting inspired by the Italian trans-avant-garde and German Neue Wilde movement. He ironized iconic symbols of the waning era of socialism by his explosive temperament, and swift and daring metaphors. Various topical and historical incentives intersect in his large contemporary "Baroque-Art Nouveau" and Pop-Art canvases based on a grandiose plane color and drawing allocation.
Although predominantly a painter, from time to time he also dabbles in sculpture. Since the early 1990s he has also designed and created spatial objects which are based on the iconographic and style repertoire of his painting art. Without a doubt, the main sphere of his interest is painting, but his work features an overlap of drawing, painting and sculpture. Post-Modernist irrationality, humor, absurd metaphor, allegory and particularly plays with symbols have found their place in Teren's work - he is a master of creating hybrid signs and pop-culture rebuses of various designations.
Laco Teren studied restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava from 1979 to 1985 under Assoc. Prof. I. Meszárošová. He participated in an internship at BINZ 39 in Zürich from 1990 to 1991 and was the visiting professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (2004). From 2003 to 2013 he worked for the Tranzit Foundation in Bratislava focusing on the support of contemporary art. Together with Ivan Csudai and Stanislav Diviš, he worked on the project entitled Traja z pekného páru (Three of a Nice Pair) at the 26th Biennial in São Paulo (2004).