Jozef Jankovič — Flow of Time

The exhibition of Jankovič's works in the Olomouc Museum of Art is a follow-up to an exhibition with the same title held at the Bratislava City Gallery (September 7 – October 23, 2016). Is being held on the anniversary of Jankovič's eightieth birthday, at which time the art community was struck with the news of his sudden passing. Tribute is thus being paid to this leading personality of Slovak sculpture from the 2nd half of the 20th century. 

The focus of the selection of his works, prepared with the participation of the artist, is on the turn of the 1970s, i.e. the period during which his personal art programmes were formed as he responded to tendencies in European art. Jankovič devised the motif of oversized human limbs morphing into expressive plastic works which bore the message of an urgent appeal in light of the social events of the time. The collection of his early works on paper and the digitalized views of his architectural projects and computer graphics presented on a touchscreen aptly illustrate Jankovič's extraordinary sense of shape and matter, and their internal dynamics, as well as his ability to empathize with contemporary means of expression which, when put together, create several parallel lines in his rich work. You will have the opportunity to see the central examples of the artist's creative thinking in in the years following the 1970s when, as part of post-modern morphology, grotesque came to the fore, communicating in a peculiar way the feelings which result from the quest for freedom and the absurdity of experiences. With its characteristic acridity, it pertinently pointed to various positions and extreme deformations of an individual living with the reality of the time.

Jozef Jankovič belonged to the circle of Bratislava confrontations from the beginning of the 1960s, and he soon won international recognition. The Informel and New Figuration morphology, influences of Pop-Art and the Post-Modernism are captured by Jankovič in a characteristic sculptural approach through which he tells us about the rise and fall of human life, he reflects them on the social level and, with an ironic exaggeration, he touches the existential limits set forth by the life in a post-totalitarian state. He became well-known especially owing to his sculptural group The Victims‘ Warning created in 1967–69 for the Slovak National Uprising Memorial in Banská Bystrica. Besides Jankovič‘s crucial works from the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the exhibition in the Olomouc Museum of Art (12 October 2017 – 11 March 2018) will show examples demonstrating the artist‘s creative thinking in the following years during which grotesque came to the scene as part of the post-modern morphology and it provided a peculiar rendition of a feeling springing from the pursuit of freedom and the absurdity of situations experienced at that time.