The young Slovak sculptor Marek Galbavý (b. 1987) develops forms of media hybrid objects and installations based on assisted and simulated ready-mades. He finds inspiration in current social context which is reflected in his works with a dose of critical irony. He puts negative state of culture (and art), as well as treachery of politics and its bad social consequences to the forefront of his interest. Installation Indicative roadmap of Slovak Galleries (2011) expresses chaotic professional profiling of public galleries. He reflects on political „purges“ in public galleries during the period of Mečiar era and post-Mečiar era in the installation titled Shadow play_6+1, (2013). In 2013, he had a larger exhibition titled Public beggars in the Nitra Gallery in Nitra. Here he also referred to the „public money disappearance“ processes. His object named State treasury (2013) asks for money to support healthcare. Coins fall into the unknown, which supported by an illusory soundtrack. Exaggeration and humor in Galbavý’s work provoke an „idle“ viewer. In his work The Slovak she-wolf (2013) he refers to the emptiness of the myth that „hard“ manual work leads to just reward. Overturned values in real time and social space are the author‘s source of mental sculptural „mass“, his personal public sculpture. In 2014 he created interactive site-specific works for the Granary Gallery in Valašské Meziříčí with the intention of virtual (re)modeling of the gallery space. Installation Export (2014) recreated the space with new web technologies. The starting point is a real object (a sack of grain) referring to the original function of the gallery building. Based on its dimensions he created a skeleton in which the illusory data mass „pulses“. Installation titled Import (2014) was created parallelly online by scanning the exterior of the gallery and people’s movement into 3D curves.
Galbavý’s newer works from the series Meditation on Structure (2016-2018) act melancholically. The focus of the expression is a combination of antique furniture (cradle, armchair, kneeling chair, …) with transparent contour frames from glass (allusion of 3D curves). Objects are the theme of private mythology with an overlap of meditation on the nature and meaning of life. The most recent series of kinetic anthropomorphic objects titled Public Structures (2018) represents a group of unstable anonymous characters. These are kinetic skeletons of figures coming as if from a virtual environment. They exude the feelings of modern existentialism.
Alena Vrbanová
art theorist