Struggling for a new vision
Early works of the artist interested in pictorial reality
The exhibition presents the selection of Marián Čunderlík’s (1926–1983) works of the 1949 to 1969 period from the Nedbalka Gallery’s collection.
Čunderlík went down in art history as a figural painter (late 1940s and 1950s), participant of Bratislava Confrontations (early 1960s), and a member of the Club of Concretists (late 1960s).
Through his early figural work, Čunderlík became an imaginary connection between a modern tradition of Slovak painting and the non-tradition of abstract tendencies.
He did not seek the essence of Slovakism, did not get fixated on folkloric subjects. Dissolving a figure into colour patches, Čunderlík focused on its associative and later universal (geometric) forms and a new pictorial concept.
Initially he experimented mainly with colour; not only with its qualities but also with its material and structure. Using the means of expression of abstract art, he wanted to embrace something that would be common to every man of the modern/nuclear era: subjective emotional experience of existential feelings and constantly changing coordinates of human experience in time and space.
Čunderlík’s artistic experiments and organisational activities were interrupted by the normalisation in the 1970s and a premature death a decade later.
