"The A-R Group (the name was derived from French words Avance – Retard which are used to describe the fast or slow function of a watch) was formally established in 1989. It represents an amalgam of visual artists of one generation, born between 1945 and 1950, who succeeded a strong “generation of clean conceptualists” from the sixties (e. g. Jankovič, Koller, Filko and others) and who according to Jana Geržová, an art historian and critic, restored the importance of an eye in the concept of perceiving visual art.
Being mostly disciples of Rudolf Fila, they clustered around the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava where many of them teach until the present day.
In 1991, the group held its first official joint exhibition in Bratislava. However, its joint activities date as far back as the end of the 1970s on various premises of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
Shortly before but especially after 1989, particular members of the group and the A-R Group as a whole held an entire series of exhibitions, both in Slovakia and abroad. The most important collective exhibitions abroad include two in Paris (1988 and 1990), in New York (1991), Ulm (1992), Karlsruhe (1993), Barcelona (1993), Brussels (1993), Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne (1994), Hamburg (1994), and Třebíc (1995).
A truly distinctive form of the group’s joint activities pays artistic tribute to various domestic and international celebrities, for instance Václav Havel (1996), Prince Karel Schwarzenberg (1998), and the Dalai Lama (2000)...
The A-R Group is not built on any avant-garde doctrines, manifestos, or programmes. It is a selective consanguinity based on commonly professed principles and jointly shared values, both aesthetic and ethical. These values provide the group with a joint manoeuvring space, while its particular members walk their own paths consistently and tenaciously, paying no attention to external circumstances and fashions."
(Peter Zajac)
“If we were to define the common denominator for the most trenchant characteristic possible of the A-R Group, we would have to reach out to certain generalities that can perhaps be characterized by the metaprefix. Metamorphic structures whose basic driving force rests in transforming the often banal impetus, regardless of whether it belongs to a material-phenomenal scale or to a semiotic-symbolic spectrum. At the same time, life and customs are usually exposed through various citations. From the seen, recorded via direct or sometimes graphically transformed visuality, through the object presentation of haptic elements (perhaps neo-dada?). In any case, however, the final outcome can be described as discrete semiotism that avoids any kind of stylized nature. Here, multiplication by matter is paradoxically its simultaneous negation.
Playful methods (e. g. by Igor Minárik, Otis Laubert, T-D, and partially also Klára Bockayová) offer a wide scale of reversal fascinations. However, the mimetic and simultaneously metaphoric also prevails in works of group’s other members. From the genial rhetoric with often parodic reflections on the one hand (e. g. Vladimír Kordoš, Daniel Fischer, Ladislav Carny és Milan Bockay) through tendencies toward hermetism with laconic means of expression on the other hand (e. g. Marián Meško or Marián Mudroch). The group’s only female member, Klára Bockayová, wins recognition through her almost demonstrative feminity – direct and ironized at the same time, scornful of and ridiculing female sentimentality…
Nevertheless, within the framework of European or world art they are not exclusive at all; on the opposite, they are quite familiar.”
(Rudolf Fila)
(The quotations are taken from the catalogue of the exhibition.)
The exhibition forms a part of the programmes organised for the Slovak Cultural Festival.
Curator: Rudolf Fila
