04 Jun 2015

Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Viktor Frešo at Kunsthalle Košice

DOKOUPIL – FREŠO

The joint exhibition of two visual artists Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Viktor Frešo in the Kunsthalle – the Hall of Art in Košice (Slovakia) is a unique meeting reasoning the contemporary media of painting and sculpture.

Jiři Georg Dokoupil (born in 1954) is a significant European artist who has devoted himself to painting medium for quite a time – from neo-expressionism painting to experi-mental positions and means of painting work. Within the space of years he has brought a whole series of innovative techniques of painting which he presents in rounded cycles (painting in tyre, whip, banana, soot, candle smoke, etc.). Within the present-day Košice exhibition he presents a series of paintings with soap bubbles. It is a process of calculated spontaneity and action where the bubbles added with pigment create strange organic and dynamic structures melodically floating over the painting area.

The Slovak artist Viktor Frešo (born in 1974) presents a series of broad-minded elementary objects which present a hybrid combining of materials and contexts: a combination of rusty iron and glittering aluminium structure, the DIY aesthetics of the Eastern Bloc countries (workshop desk, press screw with a pipe, non-functioning lifts) with a personal author´s background (music, footlights, show business). It is a boundary form of sculpture and its acceptability: post-minimalism form and a content emptiness with ready-made fragments.

A joint work by both the authors is the only big-board text statement in which they comment on the present-day art market. Thus, a new communication background with an articulated tension and different authors´ approaches is created in the triangle of painting, object, and text. Their shared platform has remained ele-mental gestures, conceptual irony and liked smART games.

Vladimír Beskid