Bratislava City Gallery (GMB)
Pálffy palace, Panská 19, Bratislava
Vernisáž 2.11. / 18:00
3. 11. 2022 – 19. 2. 2023

Martin Štrba (* 1961)
Martin Kollár (* 1971)
Ester Sabik (* 1994)

The exhibition is the second project of the Milota Havránková Foundation. In line with the foundation's concept, which is directed at supporting the presentation of photographic works not only of established but also of emerging artists.

The exhibition Quicksand presents a generationally more broadly distributed line of a specific creative approach to photography, where both its principled proximity to other visual media and its overwhelming formal distance are evident, but, above all, it features a great aesthetic, expressiveness, and content synergy resulting from such intermedial connections. Special emphasis is often placed on the construction of pictorial space, reminiscent of the practices of Renaissance or other classical painters. They exploit the tension arising from associative linking of the almost irreconcilable. They rely on a form of collective consciousness of universal communication codes, and at the same time draw on the private experience of the individual, which uniquely shifts the resulting content of the images.

The recent work of all three authors revolves around a fresh, painful, or otherwise wounding and desensitising personal experience that significantly shifted their previous perception of the world and of themselves. Pain (whether psychological or physical) is related to our personal lives, but also to the social space and time in which these lives are situated. Making sense of pain is one of man's most natural desires, and human creation is one way to develop a constructive, supra-individual conversation with it.