Dušan Kállay has been active on the artistic scene for over fifty years. During that time his work has grown and extended to almost all areas of visual arts. His success is a result of extreme talent, excellent drawing skills and intensive and persistent work. His curiosity and longing for knowledge motivated him to uncover the mysteries of life and nature and led him to a deeper study of their functioning. His approach to issues that interested him bordered on scientific methods and analysis. That is why his work features a hybrid world of animal and mechanic forms whose shapes are realistically depicted and create a fictitious and magical world. His fascination with the world of nature reveals new structures invisible to us, but whose knowledge and functioning are crucial for our existence. Although Kállay bases his work on reality, his aim is not solely depiction, but a search for new contexts, a process of discovery that never ends. His prints, drawings, paintings, and other artwork are impressive due to their suggestive language and their ability to convince the spectator that miracles do happen. He accomplishes the feelings of magic contained in all areas of his work by combining rational thinking and knowledge and the ability to transpose them to a new visual imagination. His composition of images are always complex, composed on the whole plane, and frequently with explanatory notes on the margins, which in “scientific” language comment on the motif. Kállay’s prevailing themes and motifs of towers, nests, weather vanes, tributes to personalities, caryatids, labyrinths, and riders are symbols of human virtues and vices, frequently with some relation to the culture and philosophy of classical antiquity. However, their depiction does not attack the spectators, but contains the culture of hyperbolic visual metaphor. This exhibition presents a selection of his paintings, prints, drawings, and his most recent illustration.
Eva Trojanová
Dušan Kállay was born in 1948 in Bratislava. From 1969 to 1972 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (under prof. Ján. Želibský and prof. Vincent Hložník). He also taught there from 1990 to 2018, and became a professor in 1994. He has actively participated in workshops, seminars and lectures abroad. Kállay is involved in printmaking, drawing, illustration, painting, and the design of posters, postage stamps, and cartoons. He has created hundreds of prints and drawings, almost two hundred illustrations, and dozens of postage stamp designs, while also working on two animated films. Kállay has cooperated with foreign publishing houses such as Albertiner Verlag Berlin, Shinkosa Tokyo, Grimm Press Taipei, Fukuinkan Shoten Publ. Tokyo, Bohem Oress Zürich, Otto Maier Verlag Ravensburg, Grund Paris, and others. He has won almost forty awards and prizes, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award of 1988, the BIB´73 and BIB´75 Golden Apples, the 2002 Grand Prix for the WIPA Most Beautiful Stamp of the World, the 2011 Grand Prix de l´Art Philatelique, Bruxelles, the 2015 Grand Prix Alice 150, and the Grolier Club award. He and his wife Kamila Štanclová have prepared dozens of solo exhibitions at home and abroad.
