Invitation to the Exhibition Koloman Sokol: Cuadros

Koloman Sokol (1902 – 2003) is great Slovak painter and graphic artist of 20th century, is often called "a father of slovak modern graphic art". A complicated childhood spent in the Austro-Hungarian empire followed by years of studies in Czechoslovakia and Paris received new inspiration, when he met Czech-American artist Lydia Kratinova (born in 1907), a schoolmate from the Academy of arts in Prague. They got married in 1933 during Sokol’s research fellowship in Paris and later moved to Prague and then to Mexico City.

Use of the Spanish word "cuadros" to mark a collection of own paintings, shows Sokol’s borderless love towards Mexico and its people, which is also shown in publications devoted to the "master’s" stay in this country before the2nd World War (1937 – 1941). Sokol and his wife were kindly welcomed in Mexico and they often mention it.

The exhibiton presents 25 paintings (cuadros), which are small in size but impressive in content. For Koloman Sokol these were intimate works, which were not supposed to be seen by his admirers, but stay hidden for one of his closest, so then to be revealed. It happened in summer of 2005, 2 years after the artists death, when his son Dr. George Sokol, was preparing his house for sale in Bryn Mawr, Pensylvania. They were hidden under a shelf close to his father’s work-table in main the dining-room, until Dr. Sokol found an old yellow carton box, on which his father had wrote "cuadros". In this way there were revealed unframed pictures, decades stocked under his portfolios and selections of original works.

Place of Exhibition: The City Gallery of Bratislava, the Palffy Palace, Panska Street 19, Bratislava
Date: 23.09.2009 - 25.10.2009, daily exept Mondays , 11 a.m - 6 p.m.

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