PYROGRAPHY : Dávid Demjanovič, Jarmila Mitríková

    
Artists Jarmila Mitríková (1986) and Dávid Demjanovič (1985) have been very active at contemporary art platform. Jarmila Mitríková started to study at Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2005 where she graduated this year. She started at Ivica Vidrová’s studio of ceramics and went on at Prof. Ivan Csudai’s studio of painting (she attended a scholarship at Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Helsinky in 2008). Dávid Demjanovič graduated this year at Academy of Fine Arts and Design at a studio of APK and Anthon Čierny’s studio of intermedia and multimedia (he attended a scholarship at Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2006 and at Newcastle University in England in 2008). Although each of them is concerned with different art forms (Demjanovič devotes himself to postconceptual art, installations, video art and performances while Mitríkova is concerned with painting, ceramics and collage), since the year 2009 they have both started creating paintings and objects using the soldering technique into plywood. They use a technique of pyrography as a reference to a folk amateur art. It is very interesting to follow in their work a contrast of an original folk craft and themes in comparison with an atractive contemporary visual language the work dispose of.
Exhibition Pyrography is an independent continuation of the first and more complex exhibition held in March this year in Kasárne Kulturpark in Košice. It is necessary to point out that it isn’t just a physical removal of a project to another place. What the Bratislava and Košice exhibitions have in common is only their name and technique used. Mitríková and Demjanovič abound with creativity and try to approach every exhibition project with new works. That’s why we can always see a movement in their work despite short time period. In the exhibition they present work created within past few months. Characteristic is a return to a large-scale paintings but also a work with an installation and objects. Unlike their older work the recent one is more complicated. They make up more complex stories, which they mystify and make us feel they are real. A main theme of the exhibited works is a mystification of national history which can appear as a reminder of different countries’ complexes but the artists also deal with the folk art theme again and an uneasy period during the Second World War. A considerable source of inspiration is also mysticism and religiosity typical of our country. They create small closed worlds and stories which much more then the previous ones use a sense of nostalgia and perception.
Michal Stolárik