VIENNA.- Peter Bartoš was an early exponent of conceptual and action art in Slovakia. In Situations 1945–2014, his exhibition at the Secession, he has put together a first-ever survey of his multifaceted oeuvre in the form of a chronological xerographic catalogue raisonné. In a perspective schooled by anti-art, Bartoš regards the photocopy as both a work in itself and a medium that lets him record and distribute his concepts.

This approach is already evident in early works such as the reproducible Photographic Series Paintings, created in 1967–1968, which are based on a specific grid motif that functions equally well in a range of media. When Bartoš first exhibited these pieces in 1968, he explicitly invited the viewer to “Take a picture—every photograph is an original!”

Coming from an exploration of painting as a process, Bartoš realized actions in the late 1960s in which he poured paint on various support media or scattered grids of materials like cinder, dust, chalk powder, or peat over the streets and squares of Bratislava. His primary interest in these projects concerned the physical properties of the materials, the temporary nature of works existing only as processes, and the ways in which materials might be transformed by way of accumulation or dispersal.

Nature has long been an important source of inspiration for Bartoš. He has worked with live animals on several occasions, thus in the 1971 action Vypúšt’anie holubov na slobodu [Releasing the Pigeons], which must be read in the context of the isolation of his country at the time. He was also a successful pigeon breeder for many years, and between 1979 and 1990 he worked as a conceptual artist at the Bratislava Zoo, developing models for the spatial layout of the grounds and designing various living environments for the animals. As the artist wrote about this work:

“… I was also interested in the immediate ‘zoomedium’ or in ‘animal art’ as a biological and psychological prototype of the relationship between the living forms on earth as well as the formation or creation of an ecological culture.”

Many of Bartoš’s works, which often evolve and grow more complex over the course of decades, intertwine questions of ecological planning and the shaping of natural settings with issues of liberty and privacy in connection with (national and political) boundaries. In 1993, he launched the project Nomadart, in which he discovers his homeland on foot and explores it in drawings and photographs. He settled on a predetermined circular route that passes through five Central European countries: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Austria. Its center is the village of Uhrovec, where Ľudovít Štúr (a prominent representative of the Slovak national revival movement in the nineteenth century) and Alexander Dubček (the leading figure of the Prague Spring in 1968) were born. Nation states are irrelevant to Bartoš’s idea of where he is at home: his peregrinations took the artist—who, after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, long hesitated which citizenship to adopt—over several unmarked international borders.