Marek Schovanek

Born in 1965 in what was then the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to Canada. He studied art at the University of Alberta in Edmonton before moving to Berlin in 1993 and setting up an additional residence in the now-open city of Prague.

This meandering between the systems, this stroll along the fracture lines of recent history is the subtext that shapes Marek Schovánek’s art. Life and art are both filled with possibilities, eventualities and decisions that ensure that the larger whole is in constant motion. Schovánek expresses this process of dissecting pictures and their interpretations into a multitude of options most pithily in the so-called triptychs. The term is somewhat misleading: these are not the usual three paintings, hung next to each other and interrelated. Here the surface is a panel with rotating mechanical elements such as those used in street advertising to present three different posters in succession.

The formal, the critical, the narrative, these are the components with which Schovánek writes his visual novel. He is telling us nothing less than what art can be. And what it is capable of.

Ulrich Clewing, Berlin
Translation Isabel Cole