Vladimír Kompánek — The Couple

Vladimír Kompánek, one of the most distinctive representatives of Slovak painting and sculpture, left the artistic community forever on January 21, 2011.
We have decided to include his work into our NG online gallery as a quiet memory and a tribute to the artist who definitely marked the Slovak visual culture.

The work ´The Couple´ (from 1964-65) is made of wood and is one of the numerous sculptures people admire and respect not only in Slovakia, but also abroad. Each of them echoes with his home region Rajec to which he was adhered in his childhood. His affection for this part of Slovakia offered him a lot of inspirational impulses that drew from every encounter with the local nature and people. He felt confident in his home region although sometimes he sought new inspiration in solitude to interprete the motif. He refined and innovated their form by expressive means until he reached the simplicity of presentation.

The sculpture ´The Couple´ is full of energy and sensibility and belongs to Kompánek´s so called symbol period. A symbol – archetype emerges at first in drawing or in graphics and subsequently introduces figures, gates, cottages, bell towers, cementeries and everyday village life.

The characteristic trait in Kompanek´s work is the geometrical motif predominated by the shapes and structures in tranquil horizontal and vertical lines full of excitement and vibrations. There are also typical specific shapes for the figure – round, square, flat as well as the logic of an artefact. He incised in them wedged notches, linear nicks and respected the wood pattern in the smooth material surface. He managed to articulate the inimitable, professionally perfect and at the same time modern attitude towards poetry, affection and temperament of his home region.

His friend Dominik Tatarka commented on his work in 1966 in the following words: ´Kompánek´s sawn, hewed, partially worked, so modern wooden pillars can evoke unexpected images and context, activate our subconscious to past and present conditions of the global and our own wood-working culture, recall our childhod and fate.´

The winter landscape, village and its people were a frequent inspiration for Kompánek´s paintings. He regardfully represented women – mother, grandmother, but also children games, horses and animals from fairy tales and vitalized the carnival masks with the characteristic brushwork.

Vladimír Kompánek died after short and fatal illness at the age of 83.