Stano Bubán’s exhibition entitled Chodec / Walker is inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walking, an amazing essay about nature, societal issues and escaping from civilization. His words are as meaningful today as they were 160 years ago when he wrote them. Feelings of frustration, unfulfillment and nothingness led Bubán and Eva Šrubařová to conduct outdoor painting sessions in the Little Carpathians back in November 2018. They met there religiously once a week for exactly one year in all kinds of weather. They painted at night with headlamps, early in the morning and at the magical half hour at twilight, giving themselves completely to nature and painting. The fruits of Bubán’s labors are this exhibit’s large canvases based on plein-air sketches. Through these works, Stano Bubán argues that we should rid ourselves of prejudices about interpretations of nature, landscape and flora. Most importantly, he demonstrates that landscape painting can speak in contemporary language about our issues with the environment, political frustrations and our own identity.
Stano Bubán is part of the generation which strongly influenced Slovak visual art in the second half of the 1980s. Links to the Italian trans-avant-garde and the German Neue Wilde brought the vigor of drawing and a celebration of bright and contrasting colors to his painting and have become a crucial means of expression for him. He embodies his experiences connected with many associations, symbols and signs in colors and drawing. As he himself acknowledged, “I tried to provide an answer to the question of whether painting had any meaning. Painting itself has become my theme and the qualities discovered to date are its content.”
Dagmar Kudoláni Srnenská
Stano Bubán was born on May 5, 1961 in Sečovce. From 1980 to 1986 he studied under prof. Lehotská at the Department of Monumental Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. He has been teaching at AFAD in Bratislava since 1995, and in 2002 he was appointed associate professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In 2004 he received the Guiseppe De Nittis Award at the II Biennale Internazionale d’Arte d´Nittis in Barletta. In 2013 he was a Travel Award nominee at an exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London and in 2019 he was invited to exhibit at the 8th Beijing International Art Biennale, at the National Art Museum of China. In 2018 and 2020 he won the Award of the Slovak Union of Visual Arts at the Biennale of Creative Visual Arts. He is the president of Cité Internationale des Paris and has exhibited in Vienna, Athens, Perugia, Milan, Washington, Cairo, Ljubljana and Prague. He practices Kung Fu and Tai Chi and enjoys dancing the Argentinian tango.
