In the summer months, the program of the Liptovská gallery PM Bohúňa in Liptovský Mikuláš was enriched by an exhibition entitled ROZETA Ružomberský art circle 1995 – 2022. Years later, the exhibition continued the activities of the Free Art Association ROZETA and enabled the presentation of the work of a wider range of artists from the Lower Liptov region. The visitor to the exhibition thus had the opportunity to see a rich representation of various artefacts not only from the fields of painting, graphics, collage, photography, sculpture, textile and intermedial work, but also from the fields of scenography, architecture and design.
The artistic circle currently consists of fifteen personalities, two of whom, Milan Adamčiak and Róbert Cyprich, presented themselves, unfortunately, only in memoriam. Despite this, their conceptual work has had a great influence on artistic events in the Slovak context since the 1960s. The gallery is represented by works from the private collection of artist Ján Kudlička, who is one of the founding members of the Free Art Association ROZETA. In his work, he has been dealing with the motif of the landscape throughout his life, while he is not concerned with depicting reality, but rather with the essence that the landscape radiates and tries, as he says, to get it "under the skin". This is also evidenced by his Landscape Scores, in which he connected the landscape with a musical recording. The youngest of the family - the son of Boris Kudlička, whose work visitors can see in large-format photographs, has long since crossed the boundaries of Slovak art with his theatrical scenographies. He lives in Warsaw and has created sets for the most important opera scenes around the world. He did scenography at the National Opera and the Grand Theater in Warsaw, but also at the Royal Opera in London, the State Opera in Berlin, the Opera in Frankfurt am Main, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava, the Arena Theater , in the A. Bagara Theater in Nitra, in the Wrocław Opera House, further on in Poznań and Łódź. His joint productions with the world-renowned Polish director Mariusz Trieliński were presented in Washington, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Yokohama or St. Petersburg. Right next to the opera scenography, you can see the projects of the architect Petr Abonyi, who holds the Dušan Jurkovič award for the church in Lomna, the CE.ZA.AR international award for the headquarters of GAS Oil Engineering in Spišská Teplice, and also the Crystal Wing award for the year 2012 for extraordinary contribution in the field of architecture. The basic philosophy of his work is the concept of organic architecture, but not only from the formal side, but rather from the point of view of the content of the organic worldview within the framework of postmodern plurality. Sculptor Rasťo Biarinec presented multidimensional objects in the form of bare tree trunks under the name Liptovské holes as part of the exhibition. The works in an inventive way combine the themes of Liptov, the mountain landscape, but also ecology. In his work, this artist often focuses on carving his ideas of prehistoric living creatures into petrified layers of travertine, marble or limestone. The roots of the work of another of the founding members of ROZETA and at the same time one of the initiators of its rebirth, Pavel Rusk, come from textile design. Textiles are also an important starting point for his contemporary painting and graphic work. Fine geometric structures can be discovered in his brightly colored acrylics, which, when viewed from different angles, can literally change the spatial optics. Textile artist Marta Bošelová brought to the Liptovská gallery a mosaic made of gypsum paving blocks, which she used as an adjustment to embroideries from various regions of Slovakia. The work entitled Cultural Evolution, originally inspired by an old carpet, metaphorically evokes the state of a society that tramples on its cultural values and traditions. In addition to the original members who were at the birth of the idea of the Free Art Association ROZETA, the circle of artists from Rozombé has also grown with the younger generation, such as architects Richard Kalmár and Vavrinec Kendera, sculptors Štefan Papčo and Mira Podmanická, photographer Lucia Papčová, artists Zuzana Hrušková and Monika Zmoray. The exhibition was curated by the director of the Liptovská gallery PM Bohúňa, Richard Gregor, and the director of the East Slovak gallery in Košice, Dorota Kenderová, where the exhibition will be moved after its completion in Liptovský Mikuláš. The exhibition of the ROZETA art circle in Ružomberok is not only a demonstration of the strong artistic tradition and artistic richness of the region, but also a harbinger of the September opening of the new ROZETA Gallery in Ružomberok. After many years, artists and the general public will finally have a decent art stand in the center of Dolné Liptov.
Text and photo: Vladimír Dubeň