Ľudovít Fulla – Fragments

The exhibition and the accompanying publication are divided into five parts/fragments: 1. Portraits and nudes, 2. Painting, 3. Drawing and illustration, 4. Graphic art, 5. Designs for architecture. Interpreting the works of art and individual “fragments”, the curator Katarína Bajcurová, author of the last monograph on Ľudovít Fulla (Bratislava: Slovart a Petrus, 2009), presents the public with new information that has come to light over the last ten years. The publication (exhibition catalogue) containing commentaries on particular works has been composed like a “handbook” for art collectors. Both the exhibition and the book are intended for all those who want to feast their eyes on Fulla´s masterpieces and learn more about his “minor works”, side-steps or “refrains” accompanying the “theme song” of his body of work.

This year we commemorate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Ľudovít Fulla (* 27 February 1902, Ružomberok – † 21 April 1980, Bratislava), the artist who ranks among leading figures of twentieth-century Slovak art. Fulla´s artistic talent was both spontaneous and synthetic. From the very beginning of his career as an artist, he tried to raise and meaningfully answer the question of whether it is possible to be European and Slovak artist at the same time. He found the solution to the contradiction between the traditional and the modern in the synthesis. His unique brushwork was inspired by the current art movements, children´s artwork, icon-painting, medieval painting and Slovak folk art. As the Czech writer, Milan Kundera put it, this heritage was overlaid with modern experiments in the manner of “Janáčekesque or Bartókesque synthesis”. The result was an original visual language, which was characterised by the combination of a rational, constructivist composition of forms and intense, expressive colours. Fulla became perhaps the most original Slovak artist of the 20th century. Due to his sense of the synthesis of various and often opposing elements he can be referred to as the “archaist and innovator” (Jurij Tyňanov). Fulla attained a goal that no other artist in Slovakia had yet reached: he was the first to paint an abstract picture. Though he would never abandon the horizon of the “physical mode”, he programmatically applied the postulates of non-objectivity in the area of applied graphic art and stage design. From the doctrine of “absolute painting” (which, in the language of that era, referred to non-representational, abstract art), which he had partially tried to reach during the first pinnacle of his work in the 1930s, he turned to a more traditional subject of the twentieth-century Slovak painting, which was the search for and depiction of the Slovak national myth. His projects encompassed painting, graphic art, drawing, stage design and book illustration; some of his works were also executed as tapestries.  Fulla donated his works to the state; today they can be seen in the Gallery of Ľudovít Fulla in Ružomberok (opened to the public in 1969; as the gallery building is the state of disrepair, the exhibition has been taken down in the beginning of 2022), a branch of the Slovak National Gallery. The book examines a considerable fragment of the artist´s body of work from the Nedbalka Gallery´s collection.