V. Art Book Triennial Martin

  • EXHIBITION. V. Art Book Triennial Martin
  • TERM: 27 02 – 25 05 2025
  • OPENING: 27 02 2025 at 6:30 pm
  • PLACE: Museum of Modern Art, Salon and Cabinet
  • CURATORS: Gina Renotière, Jarmila Kováčová
  • MAIN ORGANIZER: Turčianska Gallery in Martin
  • CO-ORGANISERS: Museum of Art Olomouc, Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Eugeniusz Geppert in Wrocław, Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Magyar Műveszkonyvalkotok Tarsasaga (Society of Hungarian Art Book Creators)
  • ARCHITECTONIC DESIGN: Martin Kubina Jakub Tóth
  • INSTALLATION: Adam Galko, Peter Návoj, Jakub Dušan Gallo, Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář, Daniel Opletal
  • GRAPHIC DESIGN: Marek Kianička

The author’s book as an important art form will be presented by the Olomouc Museum of Art in an exhibition that will have its premiere at the end of 2024 in Martin, Slovakia, at the 5th Triennial of the Art of the Book, co-organised by institutions from Olomouc, Wrocław, Bratislava and Budapest. Until 25 May 2025, visitors will see works by artists from the Central European region who bring a new perspective on the book as a medium and push the boundaries of visual art.

“Authors’ books are a unique combination and consonance of artistic, craft or technical disciplines with a personal creative language,” explains exhibition curator Gina Renotière.

The Olomouc Museum of Art has been involved in the regular international presentation of authors’ books at the Turčianska Gallery in Martina since the very beginning in 2015. The current fifth edition is an opportunity for artists to experiment with the spatial composition of the elements of the work and their incorporation into the installation in order to intensify the overall visual experience. The shape and visual variety of the exhibits is represented by a plethora of atypically created and invented jigsaw puzzles, loosely arranged leaf blocks, as well as spatial objects inspired by books by eighty artists from Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic.

It probably comes as no surprise that paper remains the primary medium used to create an author’s book, but this is not a dogma. The exhibition features works made of wood, textile, metal, glass, plastic, silicone or concrete and their combinations. There are books as objects, books-installations, new media books but also books conceived in a performative or process approach. “An important line in the concept of the Book Art Triennial is the integrated so-called touch library, in which the visitor and the reader in one person can leaf through book artifacts. This part of the show is addressed primarily to children, with the intention of contributing to the cultivation and shaping of their reading tastes,” adds Gina Renotière.

After the Olomouc repeat in the first half of 2025, the project will move to the Book Art Museum in Łódź, Poland, and then to the Miskolc Gallery in Hungary.

Thanks to the publishers: Artforum, Baobab, BRAK, Once Upon a Time, Centrala, Grafická dílna, Host, KHER, Knižní stezka k dětem, z. s., LUX, Meander, Paseka, Take Take Take, Uutěrky, wo-men.

AUTHOR’S BOOK IN THE ART MUSEUM

The Olomouc Museum of Art owns one of the most important collections of artists’ books in the institutions of the former Czechoslovakia. An important impulse for its creation was an extraordinary acquisition in the second half of the 1990s, when, thanks to the cooperation with the Brno theoretician Jiří Valoch, the preparation of the exhibition “Between Tradition and Experiment” (1997) succeeded in concentrating on two dozen author’s books, mostly from the 1960s. Ladislav Daněk was the initiator of the establishment of a separate collection in 2000 and became its first curator.

The collection consists of a collection of works from the second half of the 20th century with an overlap to the present and was first presented at the exhibition “Leafing through Modern Book Culture in the Collections of the Olomouc Museum of Art” in 2009.

Translated by DeepL.com