(Don’t) Be Oversensitive!
Emotions in Art
On the occasion of the exhibition (Don’t) Be Oversensitive! Emotions in Art, we are publishing an electronic catalogue of the same title, which also happens to be the first digital publication by Nitra Gallery. This full colour bilingual (Slovak-English) catalogue has 133 pages featuring an introductory curatorial text, annotations of the exhibited works, its reproductions and photo documentary of the exhibition.
The exhibition and publication project explores the presence of emotions in art and asks where the recently increased need to express emotions in art comes from. What does this turn to emotions not just in art, but also generally in society signal?
Right now, we have a chance to observe how people’s position to emotions slowly changes and also affects the way we experience and express them. We live at a time when people start to talk more and more about mental health, psychological balance (well-being), emotional intelligence. We educate ourselves, work on self-development. It is also apparent in the works by artists who are not afraid to talk about their experiences, feelings, emotions, vulnerabilities and traumas. They are trying to overcome established behavioural patterns which had previously taught us to be afraid of emotions, to avoid and suppress them, not to show them, fight them or not feel them at all.
The exhibition and catalogue will map those works which express emotions clearly and explicitly, where they become a theme in it of themselves and where artists work with emotions mostly deliberately in order to communicate their own experience. Their work thus turns into self-expression, self-realisation, a record of their psychological processes. On the other hand, the exhibition also takes a look at works we do not associate with emotions at first glance, we cannot decipher them immediately, but they are present in them nonetheless. Finally, we explore how emotions used to be treated in the broader context of the history of art and across individual art movements. How were emotions processed in geometric abstraction (which is often described as rational, impersonal, cold) or conceptual art (which prioritises the actual idea and a clean intellectual experience).
Texts: © Barbora Kurek Geržová
Proofreader: © Beáta Beláková
Translation: © Marián Minárik
Graphic Design: © Marek Kianička
Cover Design: © Martin Bízik
Format: electronic catalogue
Pages: 133
Publisher: Nitra Gallery
Year: 2024
ISBN ISBN 978-80-85746-96-9
EAN 9788085746969