Pavol Čejka — Sculpture, Lonely(ish), Badger

A graphic designer, an illustrator, a photographer, a punk, an occasional slam-poet, a singer and lyricist of the band Kamoško & Kokosko, DJ Reverend, a garden lover, a teacher and a father. 

Palo Čejka likes to experiment with graphic techniques of printing from height and over time he has taken many of them as his own. Carving is a “meditative activity”, something I’ve been drawn to since childhood and it still does me good. ‘1 He became interested in classical Japanese wood engraving: ’Working with wood and using Japanese tools is the ultimate in making work more enjoyable, but it’s time-consuming, technically and financially demanding, so I only get to do it occasionally. Lino is fast, wood is rewarding… “¹

Relief printing techniques are one of the oldest printing methods with a long domestic tradition. In addition, the ‘Rough School of Printmaking’ has attracted Pavol Čejka and other artists such as Tomáš Klepoch (1981), Juraj Horváth (1974), Emil Drličiak (1973), Ján Čumlivski (1978) and Erik Binder (1974 – 2023), aspiring them to make a generational statement. (The naming derives from the exhibition Rough School (Drsná škola): Contemporary Graphic Art Accounts with History, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, 2017.) The aforementioned artists, but not only them, react with their work to the established and preferred position of printmaking and its representatives over the years and show a contemporary approach to this artistic medium. They dig and at the same time rewrite, complete the context, return to the roots, connect printmaking with applied or, on the contrary, free art, present authorial approaches and practices, go beyond the established perception of (art) history.

In 2020, the Nitra Gallery purchased from Pavel Čejk two colour linocuts Sculpture from 2017 and Lonely(ish) from 2016 and a black and white linocut Badger from 2013.