THINK + feel Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo museum exhibition of works by the gallery’s artist Martin Moflar at the East Slovak Gallery.

Soft Lines

July 26- October 29, 2023

Click here to see a 3D virtual rendering of the exhibition

Martin Moflar presents to the public a selection of works from the last ten years of his body of work in the artis’s first solo exhibition at the East Slovak gallery . The exhibition also includes his latest oils on canvas, which are exhibited for the first time and come from Moflar’s Soft Lines series (that lent the exhibition its title).

Martin graduated from the Studio of Experimental Graphic Art at the Faculty of Arts in Kosice, Slovakia and is representative of the mid-career generation of the Kosice circle of artists that was established in the early 2000s.

The choice of this space for Moflar’s large-scale canvases is not accidental. The juxtaposition of detail, surface, shape, line and color is in direct relation to the scale as well as a significant quantity of perception and feeling. The exhibition’s gray walled high-ceiling basement space which dates back to 18th c. was the perfect choice for the exhibited art - in both its architecture and overall atmosphere. The symbiosis of the space and art, a dialogue between the two results in a truly spiritual experience, a kind of inner spiritual cleansing. This is intentional and in line with one of the main ideas at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre, - to offer within the visually over-exposed contemporary culture a purifying effect limited to elementary forms of visual communication through large scale lyrical abstract paintings.

The artist uses atypical stretchers in this latest series that lend the paintings a 3D object quality. Each stretcher has been crafted by the artist himself implementing the traditional artisanal process consisting of constructing each stretcher by hand prepping its surface - a laborious enterprise taking months in some cases. In contrast to older paintings, the more recent artworks are an attempt to achieve the effect of three dimensional space. Moflar’s painting program finds its roots in the 1940s New York school of Color Field Painting that emphasized the freeing of color from its objective context, thus making it a subject in itself.

Geometric language in painting is characteristic of the Kosice circle; it always involves a unique artistic approach toward an object-less form. Moflar uses an expressive means of minimalism; searches for archetypal shape; and works with the physical condiments of the format. The color fields and minimalist shapes create a certain lyricism yet simultaneously confront us with the (in)finitude of narration and the scope of perception i.e. seeing “beyond the surface of the format.” This is to some extent contemplative and it creates a new type of sacred iconography for the 21st century.

Moflar’s monumentality evokes poetry and expressiveness features that can be found in works of masters of abstract expressionism after 1945 such as the New York-based artist and theorist Barnett Newmann, and the California-based representative of post-war abstraction Clyfford Still.

These analogies are not merely formal but are the result of the perceptive and elaborate synthesis of Martin’s artistic program, and the artistic language that fills the gap of lyrical abstraction in the local context and becomes the central figure.

Martin Moflar studied at the Faculty of Arts in the Studio of Graphic and Experimental Art where he later he was later active as a professor.

Soft Lines opened on July 26 and continues until the end of October.

For more information contact the gallery.