Work

  The sculptor Emil Venkov is known to most of us mostly as a sculptor – monumentalist. An artist who – in big, robust, dramatic matters and volumes – expresses very convinctingly his feeling and recognition of the world, he materializes his dialogue and struggle with adamant but inspirative matter. Many of his sculptural proposals won the nationwide Slovak architectonic – sculptural competitions and as the realized works they later became an inseparable part of more sites of monuments, exterior and interior places, whether the works were related to revolutionary history of our nation, or works exceptionally present, expressing the life feeling of human being of modern civilisation. Sculpturally the works are „hand-shaped“ by a specifically rough, robust and dynamic „country“ signature with courageous space – capacity solution, integrated and richly developed composition undauntedly continuing its dialogue with the surrounding environment.

     To better understand all relations of richly differentiated Venkov´s creation, we focus, in a stricter chronology and analysis, on its first and decisive impulses that participate in formation of individual sculptural author´s conception who at the end of the 1960´s brings specifically very well-marked and individualized opinion into Slovak sculpture. The art critism did unambiguously agreed on basic features of the Venkov´s sculptural programme – dramatic character, robustness and dynamism as basic qualities significantly unchained themselves from the context and layout of the Slovak sculpture and perhaps also from the mentality of our nation. This otherness logically springs from the environment in which human, artistic and ethical nature of Emil Venkov formed. In the beginning of Emil Venkov´s pilgrimage was a deep resonance of the essence, mentality and coloring of Bulgarian ethnic origin which he comes from, and then developed by inspirative environment of Slovakia and Bratislava´s University of Arts and also by Rudolf Pribiš who wisely and sensitively lead his pupils and Venkov alone – complicated, contradictory, impulsive Venkov who firmly pursues his sculptural and life goals.
 

   The beginnings of Venkov´s art torrents are related to cabinet creation. It becomes the first pre-picture of author´s uneasy quests, struggles and victories over matter, means for verification of new creative practices and experiments, the first springboard platform toward solution of demanding works for architecture. Venkov´s cabinet plastic art from 1960´s and 1970´s are dressed in a daring dialogue with surrounding space that penetrates the sculpture extraordinarily, puts dynamism in it, opens and becomes a natural part of the composition. The world of natural and human forms becomes the sculptor´s inspirative spring. By rational and simultaneously impulsive thought correction he comes to the point of considerable elementariness of shapes which, however, never lose contact with reality. Venkov´s plastic works, charged with extraordinary energy and vitality, interpret to us author´s wide spectrum of feelings bound mostly to existence and mutual coexistence of all of us.

Danica Loviskova