2. June 2017 to 3. September 2017

Palo Macho, painter, glass-maker, pedagogue and poet (1965) is one of the most distinctive figures of the contemporary Slovak cultural scene. His unconventional artistic (and literary) work has won praise at home and abroad.

Innovation is the hallmark of Macho’s work: innovation in working with and painting on glass. Macho’s talent spans two fields – glass and painting. Glass is his canvas; he is a painter who uses the transparency, translucency, fragility and exclusivity of glass, which as opposed to a classical canvas, adds physical (spatial) as well as semantic dimensions to his work.

His original expression is supported by experimentation, playfulness and curiosity and features the use of digitally transferred photographs, imprints, drawings, windows, various plains of painting and drawings on layered glass panels. In recent years, he has painted on metal constructions incorporated in space, thus creating a specific kind of painting as object – sculpture. Thanks to his extensive studies at glass schools in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, he is able to “mold glass” into his own image and to employ the entire range of glass making technology. He began shaping his concept of work and his path to art as a young artist and has never essentially changed these opinions.

Macho’s expression, which is based on European cultural values and scholarship, is highly intellectual. Instead of entertaining us with stories and commentaries on current events, he depicts general principles of existence, thinking and the universe. His poetic and abstracting paintings inspired by his childhood, the countryside, architecture, the human figure and rituals, have a strong emotional potential and invoke associations with meditation and philosophical thinking.

Dr. Sylva Petrová, Prof. em.