Oskár Čepan

Anton Čierny (1963, Bojnice) graduated from Juraj Bartusz's Free Creativity Studio of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava in 1991. Besides his own artistic efforts, an equal part of his professional life is formed by his ongoing teaching activities. Between 2007 and 2017 he was the head of the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he currently heads the Spatial Communications Studio. Finally, he is aprominent curator and event organizer. Čierny, a member of the generation who entered the scene shortly after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, was in keeping with the period zeitgeist very quick to break free from the limits of traditional understanding of sculpture. He sees it, or art as such, as a contextually determined phenomenon active withing the given context of its space and time. Gradually, the focus of his oeuvre shifted from sculpture understood in the object-installation manner towards intermediality, with great accent placed on work with performance and video. His early works are dominated by universal topics such as the relationship between people and nature, the passing of time, the development of civilization, depicted mainly using natural materials. Later, Čierny’s interest focused more on specific social and historical but also personal or even intimate topics and problems, lately for instance the question of nationalism, historical traumas, orecology, processed using a broad scale of means of expression, ranging from found objects all the way to live action video. He won the Oskár Čepan Award in 1997, back when it was still called the Young Slovak Visual Artists of the Year; the artwork picked to represent his oeuvre at the exhibition in the Medium Gallery was The Device for Revision of Vital Energy (1995). He exhibited there together with the finalists Peter Ondrušek, Dorota Sadovská and Dušan Záhoranský.