BRATISLAVA.- Gandy Gallery announces a new group exhibition precenting a selection of portraits from Róza El-Hassan, Alva Hajn and Václav Strail.

Three sequences, six appearances: fostering a sense of place, an attempt at sensitivity…

The works respond to one another through echoes, tensions and resonances…

Each stands alone, yet finds an extension of its meaning in this encounter.

Roza El-Hassan (b. 1966), is an artist of dual Hungarian/Syrian nationality. Roza El Hassan is present internationally both with exhibitions in art institutions as well as with social design projects. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia (2017); Red Star Line Museum, Antwerp (2017); Kunstraum Riehen, Basel, with Martha Rosler (2016); Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2012); Secession, Vienna (2000). She was part of numerous group exhibitions, i.e. at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); Sharjah Art Foundation (2015); Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2015); mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2012); or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003). Her work is in public collections such as Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art, Erste Bank Group, Austria; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Museum Allerheiligen Schaffhausen; MUHKA, Antwerp; mumok, Museum of Moden Art, Vienna; Tranzit Budapest; or Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Hungarian National Gallery

Alva Hajn (1938-1991) has just had a short period of time right before the Second World War to make and show his art freely. During twenty years of normalization in Czechoslovakia he had very few opportunities to present his artworks in public, even though he has been intensively working on the paintings, objects and drawings. Based in the provincial town of Pardubice, Alva Hajn was considered as an unknown artist without some specific contacts or connections to other (more famous) Czech painters. However, between the fifties and the eighties he produced a considerable amount of the works, various in formats and rich in colours which stood out of the common image of “non-official art”. He ended his oeuvre in the 1980s by a number of objects and by a reduction of colours to black and white or even by their substitution for natural materials. He has passed away in 1991, several days before his great exhibition in Prague, which should have brought him a general recognition.

Václav Stratil (b. 1950) is a contemporary painter, performer, and conceptual artist. In the 1970s, he was part of the unofficial art community in Olomouc and created expressive, existential paintings and drawings. A visible shift toward conceptualism began to manifest in his work in the first half of the 1980s. His works often addressed the themes of time and human labor, and these drawings represented a kind of minimalist purifying ritual during the cultural stagnation of the normalization era. From the late 1980s, inscriptions began to appear in his drawings, and Václav Stratil began to focus more extensively on installations and photo-performances in photo studios. His primary subject and material became his own person, the possibilities of the self-portrait, and the mutability of human identity. He began exhibiting in galleries both in the Czech Republic and abroad after November 1989. Between 1998 and 2015, he served as head of the Drawing Studio and later the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology.