Marián Žilík — Agricultural Fields

The Agricultural Fields painting is a part of eleven canvases which Marián Žilík created in 1976 for his diploma thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava for which he received the Martin Benka Award.¹ The Nitra Gallery collection has almost half of the series as our depositories also include four other paintings:Vegetable Harvest (O 867), Green Harvest (O 891), Field (O 923) and Agricultural Cooperative (O 1408). One of the paintings is a part of the collection of the Central Slovak Gallery in Banská Bystrica (Clover Field, 0 683).

It is interesting to note that the first painting of Žilík’s diploma thesis series was purchased by Nitra Gallery in December 1976 (it happens to be the Agricultural Fields image) for 10 000 Kčs (it is around 4000€ in today’s money), which was a very generous offer for a piece by a fresh graduate as the average monthly salary at the time was around 2 500,- Kčs (Czechoslovak Crowns). The other paintings were purchased for the same amount in 1977, 1978 and 1982.

At the time of Marián Žilík’s arrival on the Slovak art scene, the period critics considered him a promising artist from among the students of Ján Želibský.² And Žilík’s early works do in fact carry sings of his teacher’s heavy influence – contrasting color schemes, flatness, simple motives leaning toward abstraction, depictions of lonely figures, inclinations toward folk and agricultural themes on one hand and urban motifs (circus, theater) on the other. 

In the 1970s, during the so-called normalization, agricultural themes were very popular and similarly as in the 1950s, they were supposed to boost the period’s ideology, even though they no longer had to comply with the earlier strict dogmatic criteria of socialist realism. Žilík’s paintings also do not include the typical “socialist” stereotypes anymore, like smiling agricultural laborers riding tractors, determined to fulfill the five-year plan to 120%. After all, the artist’s formal approach also leans toward more current painting tendencies of the period. On one hand, the theme of Žilík’s diploma thesis thus complied with the ideological demands of official art (otherwise, he would have probably not been able to graduate from the academy), but on the other hand, the visual part of his images is above the average of what we would have expected from harvest themed paintings of the socialist era. Agricultural themes seemed to have come to Žilík naturally, he was able to capture them with easy and without pathos, perhaps also thanks to his childhood in Mojmírovce in the Nitra region, the agricultural center of Slovakia. 

The composition of the painting Agricultural Fields is based on contrasting colored areas of the yellow unripe fields and the metallic grays and blues of the sky. The combine harvesting golden ears of wheat is the only detailed feature of the image – it combines precise straight lines with more expressive colored areas. If we compare Žilík’s work with almost a decade older painting of the same title by Eduard Antal, we will find several common features: flat image layouts, simple compositions and colors, earthy color schemes, geometrical shapes, abstract motifs, simplified and economical depictions of objects. Antal’s picture is a panoramic view of a landscape, dominated by statically monumental fields and sky. In comparison, Žilík chooses a much more narrow crop of reality, portrait orientation and dynamic composition featuring a combine harvester leaving tracks in the field. Most of the other pictures from Žilík’s “diploma” series that are a part of the Nitra Gallery collection also capture the process of harvesting and with only one exception (Vegetable Harvest), there are no people in them – their principal characters are machines (tractors, combines), sometimes supplemented with utility buildings in the background. This “depopulation” can be perceived as a celebration of technological development and mechanization of plant and animal production, but also as a certain form of criticism of the dehumanization of our relationship with the land and a reference to the ecological burden that mass production and monocultural agriculture bring along. Such interpretation (or over-interpretation?) might seem a bit ambivalent, but Žilík’s later positions on the protection of the natural environment indicate that these works were probably offering a critical point of view.