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Zuzka Medved'ova

There are no translations availableZuzka Medved'ova jedna z prvých Akademických Sloveniek Akademicka maliarka Zuzka Medved'ova patrila k...

Karol Miloslav Lehotsky

The Creative Work of Karol Miloslav Lehotský
by Vladimír Valentík The creative work of Karol Miloslav Lehotský consists of his...

Martin Jonas (1924-1996)

Martin Jonas (1924-1996) is probably the most significant and greatest artist of the Kovacica naive art, who had, thanks to his imagination,...

Galéria Zuzky Medveďovej

There are no translations available Galéria Zuzky Medveďovej V priebehu činnosti Galérie Zuzky Medveďovej v svojich...

Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001)

Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001) The artistic opus of Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001) consists most often of the figural compositions of genre...

Kovacica's past and the genesis of the naive art

Kovacica's past and the genesis of
the naive art During the migration of a part of the Slovak population to the "lower...

Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001)

Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001)

Zuzana Chalupova

The artistic opus of Zuzana Chalupova (1925-2001) consists most often of the figural compositions of genre painting scenes of our ordinary village life and work. Zuzana Chalupova has depicted feeding of poultry, washing, milking of cows, hoeing up of corn, harvesting and other daily chores of the villagers. She also painted them often in richly decorated interiors of village rooms during family dinners, engagements, prayers, departures of brides from their parents' homes, etc. Her pictorial expression is exceptionally narrative. In each painting she tried with her brush, with the help of numerous figures in motion, to teli a story or present an event from the daily life. The individual specificity of her painting poetry and iconography is, however, the fact that ali the figures in her paintings have almost uniformed child-looking, angelic faces with round red cheeks and innocent eyes. In the artistic universe of Zuzana Chalupova there is harmony, child-like and virginal beauty, and celebration of our village life. Her world consists of people and children with uniformed innocent child-like faces, which glow with optimism. Her grown-up men differ from the children only in their si?e and by having moustaches. In her paintings with biblical motives, Jesus, and the Apostles, and Abraham, and Moses, as well as the other biblical personalities are, in fact, bearded children. We were ali children once, and those lucky ones among us have remained so, or at least they try to be children in our brutal world of the grown-ups - nostalgically inclining towards child-like directness, light-heartedness, inno-cence and naivety. In her paintings Zuzana Chalupova materialized the world of dreams, ideal, angelic, children's world. This is the world she craved for deep down in her soul. This is her cosmos, her artistic universe.

The pictorial expression of Zuzana Chalupova is, from a formally artistic point of view, fully in harmony with her ideational tendency, with her poetry of the world of children's innocence, light-heartedness and playfulness.

The colours she uses in this emotionalism fulfil the resulting poetic plan. As far as the very organisation of picture space goes, she is nai've, candidly imperfect, which entirely matches the intention to create a universe in which these people-children, in heavenly harmony, live and work, rejoice and love.

Zuzana Chalupova

The paintings of Zuzana Chalupova have a reduced picture space and they radiate through their surface despite the attempt of the author to depict artistically the illusion of the spatial depth of the picture. This feature of her paintings - characteristic of primitive art (not in a pejorative sense of meaning) and of children's drawings - also corresponds in an excellent way to the desire to present and show artistically an ideal children's world. The reduced picture space is not characteristic only of children's and primitive art, but also of modern artistic expressions. One of the first and basic characteristics associated with the creation of modern painting in 19th century was, precisely, disintegration of the illusion of spatial depth of pictures, its perspective, that is, the illusory third dimension, as the artists since then haven't even tried any longer to realistically imitate the looks of the real world, but craved for its enrichment through their imagination and creativity, which discloses an individual inner relation of the artist towards the depicted world.

It is precisely because of this, using the example of the artistic creations of Zuzana Chalupova, as well as the examples of Jan Knazovic and Martin Jonaš's works, that we can make a parallel and notice the already well known formal closeness between the modern art and naive works of self-taught artists that appears in the history of the 20th century art.

The size and significance of Zuzana Chalupova' s art is, therefore, based on her ability to create a parallel authentic pictorial world which has its own iconography, its picturesque logic and compactness, that is, it has its own message. Just as Martin Jonaš disclosed and made visible in his paintings the metaphysical essence and truth of a peasant's being in these lands, so Zuzana Chalupova, in her paintings, showed us a better, more beautiful and humane world inhabited by the people with child-like faces and good, innocent and joyful children's souls.

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