The Modern tells the story of visual art in Slovakia in the first half of the 20th century. Our selection of works for it centred on the most important developments in domestic art between 1890/1900 and 1948. You’ll discover how art was responding to the era’s new civilizational challenges and social transformations, how artists were reacting to the world they lived in, and how all this found its way into their works, and changed the visuality and expression of visual art.
In experiencing this exposition of iconic works, drawn mostly from SNG collections, you can take in the comprehensive whole or focus on individual pieces. It includes paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs, alongside films and installations. Among its features is “non-permanent” exposition: changing exhibits presented every year – the current theme is transformations in landscape painting, titled Land of the Eye × Land of the Soul.
---
From the turn of the 20th century, we observe in Slovakia’s art two fundamental paths that artists took: the first a quest for national identity, and rendering that image in and through art, often unfolding by way of mythical concepts of the (rural) homeland and the human place within it. The second was a path open to the greater world, reflecting inner and outer life on both individual and societal levels, in a torrent of abrupt historical, civilizational, and urban changes, and the consequences they witnessed in the new century.
The exhibited works are arranged in two parallel lines visually, semantically, and pictorially, subtitled Myth × Civilization ǀ Dream × Reality. This departure from traditional authoritative, chronological, or stylistic approaches to the modern tells the story from a different angle.
These two lines are dynamic rather than absolute, interweaving and underlying one another.
Symbolically, they come together in a “sanctuary” – the exposition’s epicentre, with works by top
representatives of the modern: those who kept pace with the European avant-garde, combining in their work both traditional and innovative elements of expression. These integrated the proverbial “home and abroad”.
There are throughout the exposition pieces by artists we regard as fundamental for Slovakia’s modern art history. In certain places you will find works by significant European art and avant-garde personalities – these are present to help you better understand the complexity and ambiguity in how Slovakia took in impulses from around the world. Additionally, several interventions appear at key points of the exposition: works from the second half of the 20th century alluding to (un)connected affinities in certain semantic codes, images, shift in perception, and transformation over time.