Ľudovít Hološka — Potato Harvest

The Potato Harvest drawing depicts human figures performing a trivial task – harvesting potatoes. Even though the motif is based on the artist’s authentic observation (which he made during a fall potato harvest gig he went on with his students¹), it is not an actual transcription of reality. The drawing is divided into two horizontal parts. In the top one, the artist depicts different variations of a bending body whose schematic properties tend to evoke technical drawing or even a manual. The bottom part represents phased-out moving bodies, as if there was a condensed motif of physical dynamics in its individual time sequences, like a movie frame, pressed into each one. Figures depicted as silhouettes, using a simple black line, are transformed into an abstract symbol. The image consists of clusters of lines and shapes while the whole scene is set on a colourful grid of red, yellow and blue dots that the artist calls a colourful diagram, elaborating on it throughout his whole program. Even though it is based on pointillism, it is moved on another level when “the local colour as the original structure made room for the quality of symbols, which is retrospectively, in its synthetic value, based on the analytical examination of the initial perception.”² The drawing represents the artist’s long-term interest in the research and development of a moving figure and belongs to the analytical period of his creative program. 

Ľudovít Hološka entered the art scene on the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. His creative program is mostly base on the medium of painting and drawing, often in the form of the so-called diary entries. In this period, he focuses on object-based still-lifes, figural and landscape motifs which he simplifies and abstracts. He is mostly interested in the line, outline, contour, point, shape and colour scheme: “The line, tone, colour and presentation are described and categorised so they can be taken under consideration, and even though they can be identified in the given order as phases of his creative thought process, the image merges them deeply together as inseparable components of the artist’s tool set and creative language.”³ His work, especially his approach to colour, has been influenced by a summer stay at his friend’s, the writer Vincent Šikula’s (1970). As a result, an extensive series titled Self-Portraits was created, implementing various painting styles of the first half of the 20th century into different techniques, from aquarelles, to oil to diary drawings of his own face. The colour theme is later developed in the still life genre (Two Apples and an Orange), which formulated his colourful diagram program, and then applied it on landscapes (The Poplars of Váh, The Trees of Lukavec). In 1976, he started working on figural compositions by observing contractors at work and creating drawing analyses of their movements. Several similarly-named series are created, like Brickmasons, Servicemen. Since 1979, he has been working on the Musicians series he has been developing for decades. He has been on the scene for more than fifty years, during which his work has gone through many stages of development, but he still remains true to his motto: “To be an abstract painter with a specific solution”.⁴