A (Sur)real Slovakian Wonder: Albin Brunovsky

Hey readers. I’ve decided to write my first review on the artwork of Albin Brunovsky. His works have influenced me heavily this week, since we’re doing an urban dreamscape piece in my art class. I immediately thought of his work for inspiration, since it so heavily distorts realistic objects and expands them by detailing figments of his own mind.

Above: Desire 1978

Above: Summer Image I (1978)

Albin was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia on Christmas day of 1935. He created many types of pieces, paintings, watercolors, illustrations, woodcuts, and chalk lithographs. Upon a search of Brunovsky, you are flooded with pages and pages of immaculately detailed pieces, so detailed that justice cannot be served viewing over a computer screen. The wide variety of marks made create wonderful textures that leave you wanting to jump through the screen and glare intensely into the work and eye every intentional line. His work has such a particular look to it that makes all of his pieces recognizable, yet each work stands on it’s own and cannot be confused with another.

Brunovsky’s “Summer Image” series(1978-1979) displays several of the themes or motifs that he often explores in his work, such as nature through a surrealist lense, the female body, and Adam and Eve. Summer Image 1(1978) contains a primatic looking male and female, surrounded by rough trees. What I love about this image is the wonderful texture that the trees create, an intimidating spikiness. Despite the harshness of the trees, the two human figures seem to be in complete balance with the surrounding nature. In Summer Image 2(1979), there stands a woman with wings for arms, again surrounded by decadently textured nature. The woman is just as much, if not less, decorated as the nature surrounding her, revealing Brunovsky’s urgent message for humans to reconnect with nature and stop putting on such an arrogant show.

Above: Summer Image II (1979)

Albin Brunovsky’s work speaks strongly to me in his challenging of the modern human in society, their desire to become greater and more of a spectacle than the nature they came from. Reduced to our most basic form, stripped of our ego and show, we embody these Adam and Eve figures, primates in a sense. In our truest and most balanced human form, we are equivalent to the nature we were born out of, and that is the spectacle worth celebrating.