ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY - Emissions and Secretions
OPENING 11-06-2019 6.30pm
On Tuesday June 11th Andrej Dubravsky will inaugurate the summer season of the Richter Fine Art gallery with Emissions and Secretions, his first personal exhibition in Italy. The Slovak artist, class of ’87, challenges the ideals of nature, sexuality, gender, and power through his paintings.
Between teenagers, androgynous figures disguised as insects, rabbits, roosters, cats, and metamorphosis stages where we find his much-coveted caterpillars, Dubravsky deals with themes very dear to him and highly relevant today such as climate change, intensive agriculture, global industry, politics. Dubravsky’s paint, initially appearing as playful and formally conventional, deeply explores much darker themes such as intergenerational relations, elements of submission, complicity, porn. Unorthodox themes, like homosexuality and self-pleasure.
Is it such a utopian concept thinking of changing the world through art and painting?
<The exhibition – states the artist – basically concerns sex and nature. Since I’ve bought a house in a Slovak village I’m much more attentive to the environmental issues: I constantly see my neighbours dousing the vegetables and fruits with their chemical products, and the way they cut the grass, so short that it ends up resembling a green desert. Life in the villages always seems so cheerful and fun on Instagram, while it’s a very dark place enduring the hard blows of Central Europe’s climate change. It’s a place where it’s not so easy being gay>. Dubravsky tries to seduce the viewer into an intimate relationship. With his paintings, he beckons to undertake a pleasant trip to an uncharted land, turning the visitor in a voyeur.
The artist doesn’t just attract attention with his provocative ideas. His quick paintings are just as attractive, he works with great technique on rough canvas. The colors are rapidly injected in the painting and bestow a special atmosphere upon the image. On the other hand, the image can’t be subsequently retouched and requires a very attentive preparation as well as an accurate sketch.
<I like to leave the viewer with a question – concludes the artist – There will also be paintings of caterpillars, they too are vulnerable like boys, they have a phallic shape and are hairy on the one hand, but can be venomous and dangerous on the other. Just like people, they heavily cultivate, industrialize, poison, then eat everything>