Grand Slam Tennis & Art, the project of Juraj Králik with the participation of tennis player Martina
Navrátilová inspired by Performance art, was fixed in a “record”. Performance as a multidisciplinary art places emphasis on stage, movement and acoustic activities and suppresses artistic expression. This is partly true in the case of Tennis & Art, which can be characterised as a multidisciplinary project between Performance art and Conceptual art with a real result – paintings. The protagonists carried the idea of “zero” art into the form of Minimal art combined with Action painting, while the action element was a game with tennis balls soaked in paint. It was performed at four Grand Slam tennis courts in New York, Melbourne, Paris and London, where a series of paintings with a geometric character was created. The colour surface structured into white stripes was reminiscent of the tennis court surface. The location of smashes and the moisture of balls created various colour splashes of different shapes: round, jagged, large elongated drops. Thus the resulting picture integrated two contrasting principles: the regular geometric base and an absolutely incidental composition of colour splashes. The tennis finals also had a pictorial form, combining two seemingly distant areas, art and sport. After all, the Ancient Greeks knew this well.
