9.9 - 18.11.2007.




Painter with the Palette of a Poet – Sculptor with the Soul Full of Memories and Returns

At the turn of summer and autumn the big hall of the Danubiana will be filled by the works of Vladimír Kompánek – the most captivating personality of the “legendary” group of Mikuláš Galanda – one of the most significant Slovak sculptors and painters. Several dozens of sculptures and paintings from the last 15 years will present Kompánek's artistic programme, which was from the very beginning inseparably connected with his zealous relationship to his native country, the traditions and the culture of the nation. And he remained the same till these days.

In the context of the struggle for a modern artistic expression Kompánek found, in the late fifties, his own unmistakable sculptor's handwriting and artistic language directed at the reduction of form, pure geometrical sign, and abstracted original form – something of an archetype, which formed in his work into an almost metaphorical meaning. His wooden and metal sculptures are timeless symbols of the countryside, nature and man. The verticals of his bell-towers and penates are the combinations of majestic Gothic cathedrals and mysterious robustness of pagan stelae; his mothers and wives are distant echoes of the prehistoric Slavic Venuses, but overworked “rural madonnas” at the same time; his field signs and mythological animal figures are sometimes playful and diverse in form, other times fatally serious and majestic.

In the entire Kompánek's work we can feel the original inspiration which is connected with the original archaic quintessence of the country and the nation. His works distantly echo myths and legends and intertwine with childhood memories, the unrepeatable atmosphere of folklore events and old rituals connected with the everlasting natural cycles.

Kompánek's sculptures are partially marked by his extraordinary feeling for colour. At the beginning it was only hints and decent traces of colour on his wooden penates; later generously painted figures, or a cheerful colourfulness of his wooden small-size carnival figures – that was his way, which consequently led him to painting. He gave up to its charm at the end of the eighties.

His first pictures are more of painted sculptures – symbols and sings, in which the space projected into an area and the volume into lines and forms. The known attributes of the countryside, outlines of folk architecture, piles of hay, but mainly his characteristic field signs on a neutral, mostly monochromatic background acquired a new context. Enchanted by the possibilities of colour, Kompánek paints his grand autumn and winter countrysides, joyous carnival parades and celebrations, bizarre masks, magical figures of the Turons, mysterious kidnaps. He spreads gentle layers and background structures both on the canvas and the panel, by firm brush strokes or shovels he draws and paints the lines and silhouettes, spreads the colour in areas and colourful accents, which underline the suggestive impact of his compositions. He is bewitched by colour, by the bright purity of red and blue tones, but also by a suggestive depth of earthy ones, which are the base of his palette.

Kompánek's pictures and sculptures presented at the turn of summer in the Danubiana are full of life and nostalgia, truth and mysterious magic. They are exactly like the whole of the author's works so far – irritating in their contradiction of the modern and the traditional, the worldly and the local, the imaginative and the strictly rational. They are spontaneous and direct, and despite their thematic anchoring in memories and returns they are still topical, or even timeless.

The jubilee exhibition at the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday was prepared by the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in cooperation with the Union of Slovak Visual Artists, the founder of which Kompánek was and of which he has been an honourable chairman of up to date.

Mária Horváthová

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