Fragments of My Worlds is a title of the series of visual poetry by Milan Adamčiak from 1969. It embodies the two essential features of the neo-avantgarde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia: – the open approach to the sources and inspiration of the wide range of the visual (and popular) culture with all ambivalence characteristic for the period; - and at the same time the idiosyncratic and poetical, romantic as well as passionate searching the new, different worlds, different level of reality, often placed in the other level of the interpretation full of emotions, inner struggles and conflicts. The neo-avantgarde in Slovakia has developed from the authentic local impulses intentionally exceeding the tradition of the Slovak Modernism towards the International art. At the exhibition are presented the statements and approaches of the selected outstanding figures of the Central-European neo-avantgarde from the Bratislava circle. Their work demonstrates the unique overlapping of the new media and trends such as conceptual art, pop art, geometrical abstraction, new music, performance, visual poetry as well as mass media, and the using of the development and the huge boom of the distribution of pictures and information particularly in 1960s and its misuse by the political propaganda in 1970s. Historical concepts are worth preserving also as visions of the future of the society. Nevertheless, the main benefits arising from this movement are the actual worlds which the artists created and the fragments of which this exhibition is presenting.

Curated by Lucia Gregorová Stach

Photocredit: Adam Šakový

Courtesy SODA Gallery

www.sodagallery.cz