Svätopluk Mikyta

Svätopluk Mikyta is an artist who mediates between the distant poles of binary structures like the local / global, private / public, representational / abstract, past / present and many other dualities to explore his own vision about an artistic position which is deeply rooted into the Central European socio-cultural reality. Through his series of works realized in various medium from drawings to ceramics, from performative actions to installations and in many different traditional and experimental artistic technics, he is always been seeking the most appropriate way to express the complexity of being determined by ideological narratives, intellectual burden of unsolved historical heritage and the ubiquitous presence of the post-communist condition.

In his “re-drawing” series he investigated the visual phenomenology of the political power representation, the iconography of different, sometimes antagonistic ideological narratives, the symbolic forms of spiritual obsessions and the attractive demonstration of biopolitics through the choreographed mass demonstrations of controlled bodies. Mikyta uses the esthetics of the revolutionary avant-garde movement to enhance the striking factor of the old photos cut out from second hand books published sometimes in the XX^th century somewhere in Central Europe. He uses the codes of colors: the red, black and white to overwrite physically the mass-produced images which are the tools for ideological and political manipulation. The brutal intervention onto the surface of the printed photos is an esthetical act but driven by moral indignation. He creates disciplined structures which superimpose the original composition and rearrange the visual impact mechanism of the outdated vocabulary of the propaganda instruments. After the graphic intervention what the artists’ hand executed, the overlayered, distorted book pages gain a new quality, a kind of visual remedy against the post-traumatic condition which is caused by the untold historical tragedies and the lack of consensual collective memory. 

Taking the other binary opposition of the collective identity articulated in the format of the discourse of nationalism, Mikyta in his artistic practice is constantly searching for the autonomy and his artistic identity. He refuses the internalization of the indoctrinated ideas but instead he uses the sophisticated tools of self-reflection, sharp irony and strong skill of critical analysis. 

In his artistic practice he never sticks to certain technic or medium, he is continuously experimenting with the different materials, the unusual solution in the method of installations, with the different format of presentation and with the meaningful details of the exhibition display. Mikyta is thinking in series of works when he explores and materialize his ideas, but when he feels the subject or the core topic has already been exploited and the idea expired, he turns into another direction, looking for a new way of expression. 

Svätopluk Mikyta was born in 1973 in Čadca, in a small town in northern Slovakia (former Czechoslovakia), near the border with Poland and the Czech Republic. From 1992 to 1995 he studied drawing and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) in Bratislava at the studio of Free Graphics and Book Illustration headed by Prof. V. Kolenčík, and later in 1999 for a year he continued his study there in ceramics at the studio of Prof. I. Langerová-Vidrová. In between, in 1996 he got a scholarship to Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart where he improved his skills in printmaking under the guidance of Prof. W. Gäfgen. In 2001-2002 Mikyta received DAAD scholarship to HDK Berlin at Prof. B. Koberling. Between 2003-2013 he has worked at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design first as an assistant professor at the Department of Visual Communication, from 2008 in the Cabinet of Drawing. Since 2011 he has been working as the head of the Drawing and Graphics Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Technology (FaVU VUT) in Brno. He attended several artist-in-residence programs like: PROGR – residence program in Bern (2004) and ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program), New York (2009). In 2003 Mikyta was one of the shortlisted artists and in 2008 he became the winner of the Oscar Čepan Award. In 2011 he won the prestigious art prize the STRABAG Artaward International in Vienna. 

Mikyta always considered as an inescapable duty to actively support the local community of the artists, so in 2008 together with Zuzana Bodnárová curator, they initiated and founded the art center Banská St a nica Contemporary located in Banská Štiavnica’s modernist train station, which since has been operating as an artist-in-residence platform and professional printing workshop for supporting the creation of new artworks, for publishing artists’ books and producing limited edition graphic prints. In 2019 the institution has got the opportunity to move to the city center and thanks to some public funding they could extent the program’s capacity, to receive more artists for residency projects and increase the physical space for creative activity and for public events.

From the beginning of his artistic carrier Mikyta made drawings every single day as a kind of visual diary in A4 format. He mostly used simple red and blue ink pen and the clear, accurate and vigorous lines depicted iconic objects and symbols from the terrain of the representation of Slovak national identity, from the mythical figure of Jánošík to the double cross of the state coat of arms, from the archaic scythe to puppet like creatures made of folkloric elements. The drawings could be considered as ironic commentary of political actualities, sharp criticism over the nationalistic rhetoric, sarcastic exaggeration highlighting the contradiction of various social phenomena or just simply poetic representations of the artist’s current feelings and mood. Over decades he produced thousands of drawings in this way and the accumulated works can be treated as a kind of visual encyclopedia of ideological symbols, human characters and social behaviors, deliberated fireworks of visual gags and poignant pictorial travesties through which he condenses the visual vocabulary of everyday impressions into a deeply personal realm of graphic metaphors.

Svätopluk Mikyta is fascinated by the material and sensual quality of the old books printing technology, especially when the photographic images were transferred to mass reproduction like the photogravure or heliogravure.  Mikyta has been collecting since years found photography, photographic reproductions as supplements in books, old, ragged postcards and newspaper prints from antiquity bookstores, flea-markets around different European cities during his intense traveling. From 1997 he has started to produce vast series of manipulated, over-drawn, over-painted small scale graphic works using the original pages taken from second hand books.

At the beginning he used mostly innocent thematic, like documentation on sport events or zoological photos of animals. He just enjoyed the magic of manipulation as his graphic intervention completely restructured and recontextualized the original visual content and since the skillful drawing technic and the similarity of the color tonality, this was almost unnoticeable.

Later he discovered that the strength of visual manipulation could be compared with the technology of ideological manipulation, since both intentions are based on the same logic: the unnoticeable reframing and reinterpreting of the reality. He found books documenting the stormy history of Central European region throughout decades of XXth century and he started to use images on the conflictual process of arising the nation states among the inter-war period geopolitical circumstances, the heroes and dramas of the construction of the national identity, the sign and symbols of the ideological and religious propaganda, the compelling representations of state power and the relation of the individual towards the totalitarian repression, the rhetoric and physical presence of the failed modernization attempt, the impressive demonstration of the mass gymnastic exercise by Sokol organizations, just mentioning a few from the wide variety of topics what he involve into his artistic investigations.

The visual language of this “re-drawing” series – as the artist calls these works – is created by this complex appropriation process features a certain gloomy ambiguity. The visual codes appearing on the surface are sourced one hand from the censorship practices of the different kind of totalitarian regimes and on the other hand are deeply rooted in the color-codes and preferred geometrical shapes and forms of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde, the constructivists and activists’ movements of the East-European art history. These two antagonistic positions are present in all series which provide significant tension of the manipulated images. 

The small scale, individual manipulated graphic works then are adjusted in traditional way mounted and framed in authentic, old frames taken from the flea market too and evoking the historical period where the original photo is coming from. Mikyta always takes attention on the visual impacts of the installation of these “re-drawings” and creates a vibrant tension by confronting visual quotations from seemingly different realm of local history. The colored background is treated as a new layer and an additional surface to provide extended meanings and reference to the propaganda decorations from the communist period. While the different sized framed works are ordered in group compositions, kind of patch-work effect referring the lay-out of the traditional format as the precious family photographs were placed on the traditional Slovakian farm houses’ walls. 

In 2016 Mikyta summarized the previous twenty years ‘re-drawing’ series and published an artist-book entitled “Homo Viator”. In this book he collected, documented and reproduced the most significant items of his series, providing an ‘Hommage’ of the 5 most exploited books what he cut apart, appropriated and re-used during the creative process and then scattered the re-contextualized pages amongst collectors all over Europe. This is the list of the books:

Bernhard Grzimek: Wir Tiere sind ja gar nicht so! Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung Stuttgart, 1952
Die Olympischen Spiele: Limpert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1952
Vilém Mucha: První celostátní spartakiada, Státní tělovýchovné nakladatelství, Praha, 1956
Rudolf Prochazka: Památník X. sletu Všesokolského v Praze 1938, Praha, ČOS 1939
Hans Surén: Mensch und Sonne : Arisch-Olympischer Geist, Verlag Scherl, Berlin 1936

In this series Mikyta uses the cut-out pages from Surén’s book which was published in the late 30’s during the sick and evil atmosphere contaminated by the frantic Nazi ideology of the time. In this social-historical-ideological context, the Arcadian peaceful character of the nature and the heavenly grace of the beautiful bodies are ambiguous and confusing elements of the images. The beauty of the well treated, sun-bathed, willowy bodies of the naked males and females, the radiant exhilaration of the group exercise in the flowery meadows, sun-drenched beaches are obvious delusion of a faked scenario. Against the individual will and intentions of the actors on the photographs they all participate in a historical process which reached the unavoidable tragic collapse.

Mikyta in this series slightly changed the colors, shifted the red into more orange and applying it on the naked bodies, creating this way an unnatural skin tone like the natural appearance of human specimen belonging to a strange and exotic tribe. From this prospective the artist is playing a complex and sophisticated esthetical and emotional game with the found objects from the past – the original pages from the book – based on a sympathetic travesty of the methods taken from the practice of cultural anthropologists. Seemingly the artist takes the position of an unbiased observer but during the process when he gets involved deeper and deeper into the subject of his observation his distant outsider position turns into a more concerned psychological state. In the “Orange Human” series Mikyta offers a fictitious ethnographical attempt to understand his own historical past. Throughout the emotional and magical gesture of the artist’s hand touches, the traces of the pencil overdrawing, the orange layers covering the human bodies, the symbolic reshaping of the reproductions, the unreal, dreamlike character of the deconstructed images one can be treated as a tender attempt to release the past from its unbearable burden and to offer reconciliation with the present. 

Ceramic technique is not the most popular and frequently used material and techniques in the contemporary art practice, although in the last years it is becoming more and more preferred among the younger generations. From the beginning of his artistic career Svätopluk Mikyta has created ceramic works, sculptures and objects and organically incorporated them into his special installations based on drawings and other images. His spectacular early work (Porcelain Wood, 2002) is based on trompe l’oeil effect, but its also an emotional reference to the rural way of life where the pile of log prepared next to the iron stove is the guarantee of the survival. The wall installation of the ceramic sculpture Weeping Wall, 2002 and the series of painted plates with the iconic symbol of communist ideology, the five-pointed star (Dirty Memories, 2006) are experimental works, an extended format where he continues to analyze the same motives which he frequently used in the diary drawing and the re-drawing series. Some years ago, Mikyta turned back to the ceramic workshop again, but he started to use this traditional medium as a field for experimentation. He made experiments with the forms, the density of the material, the coloring, mixing different component, with all the elements of the creative process which absorb the narrative or literary meaning from the final artifacts. The artistic attention started to shift from the ideological, message-based content into a more sublime direction, investigating more intensely the formal and esthetical qualities of the artworks. 

The turn into the abstraction is significant in his other works too. The huge scale abstract paintings what he exhibited in 2019 under the title Kolaps Lapsus are based on certain environmental consideration to minimize his ecological footprint as he re-used the waste accumulated and collected in the studio over the years during the creative process: residue of paint, ink and pigments, toxic chemicals which are direct threat for the environment are recycled back to the creative circulation and serving as useful material again.  

Barnabás Bencsik