Featured Artist
For the last few years the Slovak painter Peter Cvik has been layering different experiences and stories out of sheer visual memory. Without using photos or any other found imagery, Cvik builds new positions of “synthetic” reality that reminds us of something real or experienced within a flux of time where memories float. His landscapes evoke a sense of collision between opposing worlds without evoking the sense of a specific place. Peter Cvik equates his paintings to a sentence that ends with three dots which viewers can complete on their own.
Peter Cvik’s Solo show semadgniM (Mindgames backwards) is his first private museum exhibition. It includes 34 painting in various sizes. It is the selection of works produced in the last three years, more than half of them were produced for this show. The exhibition juxtaposes monumental works (biggest are 380 x 490 cm and 230 x 600 cm) and intimate works (24 x 30 cm or 60 x 50 cm). For Peter Cvik small works are as important as the big ones, “sometimes it takes even longer to produce satisfying result on such a small surface,” he says. Titles are also very important for him. He sees titles as the first linguistic information that can give audience specific direction of reading the piece while also leaving them space for their own interpretation.
The process of looking at Peter Cvik’s paintings is like entering a disorienting mind-game, says the show curator, Mia Legenstein. Based on the viewer’s own memories and perception, they enter a landscape which makes the continuum of motion in space-time a visceral experience. “Cvik simultaneously creates and destroys the illusion of depth through various layering processes and techniques, ultimately referring back to the flatness of the canvas,” says Mia Legenstein.
Semagdnim, October 2nd to December 31st 2022 in Zoya Museum by Primecut Contemporary Culture, Partizánska 2275, 90001 Modra Slovakia.
Helena McFadzean, text coordinator. Online viewing room
Peter Cvik (*1985) was born and raised in Bratislava/Slovakia. He studied at Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (2006-2012) where he did also his PhD. studies in field of visual art (2012-2017). His first solo debut abroad was on 5th Biennale of Young Art in Moscow in 2016. Since that time he is exhibiting mostly internationally. His first artist in residency project was in 2017 in Leipzig/Germany. Since that time Peter is attending at least one artist in residency project during the year (Paris/France, Olomouc/Czech republic, Jerusalem/Israel etc.) In 2020 he started to cooperate with Prime Cut Contemporary Culture that is agency that represents Peter Cvik as only Slovak artist along other international artist globally. His works are in private collections around the world and 5 of his graphic works are in collection of Slovak National Gallery.