Marián Žilík — Housing Estate I. D/2

Marián Žilík focused on painting and photography, but people of Nitra remember him mostly thanks to a large number of artworks he has created for the town’s public space. While his initial painting efforts concentrated mostly on agricultural themes, his style developed from expressive realism to neo-expressionism over the course of the 1970s. Later on, he also worked on figurative paintings, capturing various environments, including the theatre, circus and sports. In the 1980s, he focused on urban themes, using higher levels of stylisation, flatness and abstract geometric shapes. He stopped painting in the 1990s when turned to the public space instead. In 1996, Nitra’s high street pedestrian zone was restored and enhanced with several of his sculpture works: the Sword and the Well in front of the Ponitrianske Museum, a granite fountain in front of the former Dom módy [Fashion House, department store] or the street’s sewage covers featuring various Great Moravian themes. At the turn of the 2000/2001, he created the Millennium Memorial – the Stool at the Castle Square, inscribed with verses from Proglas written in the Glagolitic script. Žilík’s initial photography works were dominated by natural and urban themes with specific poetics, while some of his last ones were used as a means of criticism, focusing on ecological and environmental topics. 

The oil on canvas from Nitra Gallery’s collection titled Housing Estate I. D/2 most probably captures Chrenová I., a housing estate in Nitra. The village Chrenová used to be called Tormoš until 1945 and became a Nitra borough in 1960. Shortly afterwards, a new housing estate project by architect Michal Maximilián Scheer was initiated. The first stage of the construction took place between 1963 and 1965 and combined low-rise prefabricated panel buildings arranged into a honeycomb pattern with high-rise buildings positioned into the shape of the letter Y with ground floor conservatories. Specialists consider the Chrenová I. housing estate to be one of the best post-war housing complexes in Slovakia. Žilík painted it with severely reduced shapes, focusing on abstract geometry with “construction” elements of the image being the silhouettes of the buildings portrayed as various single-colour surfaces. The central part shows a strip of buildings in yellow and ochre surrounded by grey areas. Other colours have a much smaller presence and are visible mainly in the details. The background features shades of red, pink and brick-red, probably depicting the massif of Zobor. The distinctive green strip on the peak is not just a visual and compositional aid, it is a simplified and functional representation of the now-decommissioned cableway to Zobor. As Marián Žilík used to paint images in various versions and reproductions, there is an image very similar to ours in the collection of another gallery, the Ernest Zmeták Art Gallery in Nové Zámky. It is interesting to note the painting has a completely different title (Change I. – it could be interpreted as a reference to the old Nitra changing due the new massive housing estate projects) and later dating – 1982. The paintings feature very similar compositions, differing only in colour tones and some of the buildings’ details. It is possible that more paintings like this exist…