Daniel Balabán
6 June – 30 September 2018
open daily except Mondays from 10 AM to 6 PM
East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice, Castle No. 3
vernissage | 6 June from 5 PM
curator | Marcela Rusinko
promoted by | East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice
The painter Daniel Balabán (1957) has been among the classical contemporary Czech figural painters on the domestic art scene from the mid-eighties. He comes with Šumperk and from 1962 has lived in Ostrava. From 1993 he has been the head of the Department of Painting at the University of Ostrava, for more than two decades raising the young generation of artists. The art work of Daniel Balabán continues the tradition of Czech post-war figuration. At the same time it not only for his strong sovereign painterly gestures, but also the historical and intellectual connotations and in a valuable way overlap and develop. After three decades of development has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Czech painting. A painterly gesture is based on a significantly subjective seeing and experiencing of the world, family history, memories, records of journeys, but also the events taking place in the publicly shared space. Daniel Balabán is a painter, at the same time, however, inseparably a teacher, intensively considering his work in a broad philosophical and psychological context. He is also considers the polarity Man and Woman, their different worlds and the possibilities for their overlap. Balabán’s painting is strongly subjective, so that it can eventually send a generally valid message. Symptomatic paintings, visual fragments of our private lives and shared cultural contents and formulas. He prefers to work in an original way oscillating on the border of a not easily deciphered intimate document, intellectual commentary or media grotesques with elements of black humour. Often these layers overlap, deny but ultimately strengthen each other, so that the whole inadvertently reflects the ambiguity of interpretations of today's world. The exhibition is loosely based on the author's retrospective last year in GVU in Ostrava, but builds on the current creative position, the expression of the last ten years. The Pardubice public for the first time sees the symbolic figure of the internal Woman, with momentary intrusions from the male and female universes. But also images and inspirations from journeys, often showing known tourist sites integrally associated with the perception of the local cultural identity, perceiving them however in a new, completely distinctive painterly manner.
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