After Veľká ryba | Big Fish, Laco Teren returns to the Danubiana in grand style with Veterný kôň | Wind Horse. This exhibition which he originally planned in celebration of his 60th birthday, is named after his new work which he created for this occasion. However, due to the confluence of unwanted and unexpected events, it has taken on a different flavor. A corona virus era flavor. We would like to believe that this is a post-corona exhibition marking our first, desired contact with the world we were used to, but which apparently will no longer be the same… At the January finissage of the artist’s retrospective at the Slovak National Gallery I promised that the exhibition at the Danubiana would be different, distinctive, and composed of Teren’s other, older, unseen and unknown works as well as his most recent creations, and in my opinion we have done just that. Thanks in part to the forced and unexpected collective quarantine, life in seclusion brought creative concentration and the birth of a series of new paintings. Thus, we offer to our visitors, hungry and thirsty for artistic experience, a special corona selection of Teren’s work, here and now.
Laco Teren is a multifaceted artist. A painter, sculptor, graphic artist and drawer, he attracts and allures not only by his work and personality, but also by his words. Picture and story, painting and story-telling become two sides of the coin of his universal and impressive artistic personality. Although painting is the main sphere of Teren’s interest, we can also speak of the overlap of drawing, painting and sculpture. This exhibition strives to reveal these mutual eclipses and convergences, while providing insight to the artist’s visual thinking and creative background. More than at any time before, Laco Teren gazes at us through his paintings. From eye to eye, since only the eyes are left uncovered by the face mask... This lover of lowlands continues to enjoy the intoxicating beauty of flowers; with his peculiar obsession he paints the fruits of surrounding gardens, and through them, tells tragicomic stories and allegories, but not only from our lives…. sometimes a line is sufficient, many long and short lines to be precise, but occasionally a colorful brushstroke and the heroes of his/our most secret dreams come to life on large canvasses. At times they are ominously concrete, at other times they open the gates of our imagination and our private and intimate feelings… and gallop toward us on the winds of the Danube...
Katarína Bajcurová
Laco Teren (1960) studied restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (1979 – 1985, under Associate professor Irina Meszárošová). He participated in an internship at BINZ 39, Zürich (1990 – 1991) and was visiting professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and design in Prague (2004). From 2003 to 2013 he worked for the TRANZIT Foundation in Bratislava which provides support to contemporary art. He participated at the 26th Biennial at São Paulo (2004) with the project Traja z pekného páru (Three of a Nice Pair, along with Ivan Csudai and Stanislav Diviš). Post-modern irrationality, humor, absurd metaphor, allegory and surrealistically civilist symbols have found a home in his work; he is a master of hybrid signs and pop-cultural riddles.
