Permanent exhibition

STALA EXPOZICIA

Permanent Exhibition

For Mikuláš Galanda, HOME was more than just a physical place; it was his space, refuge, as well as a source of melancholy and desires. Mikuláš Galanda was born in nearby Turčianske Teplice, as the oldest child of middle-class parents Malvína Margita Tauberová and Martin August Galanda. This was where he spent his peaceful childhood with his brother Richard and his two sisters, Margita and Štefánia, but it was also where he felt isolated during his grammar school studies due to a serious illness resulting in the amputation of his leg. HOME was a refuge to which Galanda returned after his lack of success and anxiety at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, and also where he spent three years waiting for the opportunity to be accepted at university in Prague. It was a home full of memories, anxieties and dreams that shaped his early graphic art. It was also the home to which he returned for a short time after graduating from the Prague Academy and passing his professorial exams in 1928 and from where he moved to Bratislava to follow Ľudovít Fulla. During his teaching career at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava, it was a place for taking a rest from work during the summer holidays, a place for meeting his family – in particular his sister Štefánia, a place for sending letters from around the world, a place for romantic walks around the spa park with his wife Máriou Boudová and for open-air painting, where the organic entanglement of tree branches winding around the stream was not only a natural background, but in Galanda’s drawings became something personal, sometimes even corporal.

In 1923, Mikuláš Galanda was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he transferred after one year at the Prague School of Applied Arts. Here he finally began to realise his dreams about art, which was not fixed in a form, but in searching for depth under the “cover of the subject-matter”. From the very beginning, he highlighted the content; at first influenced by melancholy and his own metaphysical ideas, and later focusing on social problems and the reality of the economic crisis and deepening social inequalities. The left-wing magazine DAV played an important role at this stage, the first issue appearing in 1924. Galanda created its cover page with a red exclamation mark – a striking work of modern visual expression and graphic punch, which set the tone for the whole magazine. Under the pseudonym la ganda, he also contributed a series of smaller linocuts to the magazine. For Galanda, this was not only about illustrating text; his artworks were an independent space for expressing urgent social themes. In his cycle of lithographies “Láska v meste” [Love in the City] published in DAV in 1925, he captured the anonymity and alienation of the modern city. From graphic art, marked by a sharp reflection on social relations with artistic strength and a political message, he later shifted towards a more painting-based resolution of social themes. Influenced by modern European painting, he captures people on the peripephy, as well as the phenomenon of the Slovak countryside. Works Vysťahovalec [Emigrant], Pijani [Drinkers], Žobraví speváci [Mendicant singers], marked by a deep humanism together with a strong aesthetic perspective, combined within them a realistic abbreviation with Cubist stylisation and overall a more delicate approach to form. He reflected social themes just as intensely, but through a more elaborated artistic expression.

Fulla and Galanda – or FU-GA – is not just a friendship between two men which began during their studies together at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, but also a brand and artistic programme into which they involved themselves most intensely between 1929 and 1932, when they had a joint studio in Bratislava. In 1930, the first issue of “Súkromné listy” [Private Letters] was published, in which they manifested their ideas on modern art with a desire to inform the Slovak public. Via an elaborate typography inspired by foreign art magazines, they defended their efforts to free themselves from traditional representational art and celebrated the autonomy of the modern picture. Their starting-point was their joint teaching work at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava, which under the leadership of Professor Vydra, tried to create a modern type of school inspired by the German Bauhaus. The illustrations in “Private Letters” put forward the ideas of elementarism, “as the final stage of the development of painting” and the differing approaches of the artistic programme of each artist. Compared to Fulla’s spontaneous, playful constructivist style, Galanda’s was more elaborated, deeper and more organic. With his gradual abstraction of the figure into fluid torsos, Galanda achieved experimental compositions, reminiscient of an amoeba or merging cells. Absolute images made of lines and surfaces of colour, as he called them in “Private Letters” appear mainly in his illustrations, for example on the cover of the book by A. Pogorielov, “Circles”, or in the poetry collection by I. l. Marko “Cold Light”. However, in his non-commissioned work, visual poetry such as the cycle “Poems in Drawings”, he does not abandon the objective world, but rather searches for answers in surrealism and metaphysical still lifes.