Untitled (Halo)

The international success of Slovak artist Roman Ondak has few parallels in the context of Slovak and Czech art. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at a number of major institutions around the world, including Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York, and he has participated in prestigious international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and documenta in Kassel. This sustained institutional interest ranks him among the most successful post-conceptual artists in central Europe. Ondak’s work draws on the legacy of conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, which he combines with a personal style full of memories and poeticized everyday life as well as reflections on collective memory and historical identity. He works with ordinary objects, materials, and situations, subtly shifting and transforming their meanings through discreet interventions. In an untitled series of early paintings Ondak used the covers of discarded books and painted over them with illustrations taken from his collection of popular science publications, which he had been amassing since childhood in the 1970s and 1980s. The process of repainting placed the original illustrations in new contexts, granting them autonomy and freeing them from the framework of educational publications from the Normalization era, which were often marked by censorship, ideological manipulation, and distortions of information. This untitled series thus became part of Ondak’s program in the early 1990s, in which he focused primarily on the issue of the distorted reality of information sources.

99 % of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor family.