For the first time, Juraj Gavula´s monographic exhibition offers a comprehensive overview
of his sculptural work that started in the late 1960s. Gavula (b. 1942) gained his first
profound experience with sculpture when studying a stone sculpture at the Secondary
School of Applied Arts in Bratislava. In 1969, he graduated from the newly established and
very progressive Department of glass in architecture, led by Václav Cigler, at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Bratislava. These two bases became crucial to his work. He was influenced
by a perfect knowledge of stone processing on the one hand and experimental possibilities
of new material on the other hand. Gavula connected traditional stone with glass not by
combining the two materials but by transferring the philosophy of shape from glass to
stone; he focused on developing modern abstract shapes, geometric, organic, and new
machine aesthetics. It was an internal, content combination of traditional sculptural
materials and glass through the artist´s intense search for a perfect form. The artist´s
crucial shapes included natural, biological forms filled with vitality whose dynamics he
enhanced by allusive technical and architectural elements and details. Gavula´s work is
characterised by organic unity of natural structures and machine construction mechanisms
and by employing unconventional combinations of materials, such as stone and bronze,
glass and wood, etc. Although he drew upon the experimental work with glass, his
exclusive material became stone of different types and colours. Some shapes are
recurring in Gavula´s work as a refrain. The artist reworks them in many variations,
materials and dimensions. In some of his works, visually indistinct personal memories of
his childhood spent in the village of Čabiny are hidden in abstract and strongly stylised
form, as if the sculptures had another, secret plan. Gavula´s search for a perfect shape,
i.e. the one where nothing needs to be added or removed, is based on a continuous
verification in diary drawings and records he has made since the 1970s. During the
“normalisation”, abstract art could have freely developed only as a decorative part of the
architecture. At the time of massive socialistic construction, Gavula focused on abstract
and strongly stylised plant forms, human and animal figures in many monumental works
for architecture throughout the country. The exhibition divided into thematic sections
presents the artist´s dialogue between his works for public space, works made on
sculpture symposiums and small-size sculptures through artworks, photographic
documentation and drawings.
Curated Matej Gavula a Vladimíra Büngerová
Partner The Július Koller Society
Courtesy of the artist and The Július Koller Societys
Photocredit Peter Sit