Start date: Friday, September 11, 2009
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, November 29, 2009

Milan Dobeš was born in 1929 in Prerov and studied at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Bratislava with Ladislav Cemicky and Bedrich Hoffstadter. Since 1960 he has been producing visual-kinetic and luminous-kinetic objects. He has written essays on Light and Movement and on Dynamic Constructivism.

Dobeš represents the top quality in the field of kinetic – optical art derived from a Constructivist base. A retrospective of his kinetic works is permanently installed at the Milan Dobeš Museum in Bratislava which was set up by the European Cultural Society Foundation. Dobeš also owns a systematic collection of the optical and kinetic works of other artists that shows the connection between constructivism and the language of geometry. These works, which include op art by Alviani, Anuszkiewics, Kandinsky, Cruz-Diez, Vasarely, Hugo Demartini, Bridget Riley, Gyula Kosice, and Miroslav Sutej, are on view at the Milan Dobeš Museum.

This Museum is lending twelve of Dobeš’ transformable works (some with kinetic movement and some with optical transformations) to the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art.

Viktor Hulík was born in Bratislava in 1949 and between 1968 and 1974 studied at Bratislava’s Academy of Fine Arts. By 1988 he was a member of the International Artist Group, and received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and won a prize at the Slovak Poster Triennial.

In rejecting the Socialist Realism prevalent in his country in the 1970’s, Hulík moved into the area of transformable geometric works. In 2002 he became a member of MADI and has been in several MADI group shows.

“The most striking philosophical paradigm of Hulík’s work is the relation between order and chaos, reflected in a permanent emergence of new images….The extension of space beyond the original frame was to have a far-reaching effect on Hulík’s work, opening the way to three, and later to four dimensional work. This approach brought to fruition his shifters – pictures of diverse images challenging the spectator to cooperate…[His] rotors [beginning in 1984] displayed a visible geometric arrangement…Shifts and Projection (1985)…clearly show the composition of geometric screens and the system of work oscillating within order and its destruction…Hulík managed to develop a “non-permanent”, variable pictorial image, which expressed the non-permanence of structures, variability, and change within the given structure.”

This exhibit is funded by the Office of Cultural Affairs of the City of Dallas and Kilgore Law Firm.