The articel from the correspondent of Municipality of the City Bratislava:

TITLE: Museum of the Month: Mirbach Palace - Bratislava City Gallery

INTRO: The Mirbach Palace is one of Bratislava's main galleries. As well as a permanent exhibition of baroque art, it's currently hosting an outstanding exhibition by Slovak-Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc, as James Thomson found out.

The rococo Mirbach Palace, built between 1768 and 1770, is one of the main locations of the Bratislava City Gallery, and includes four floors of exhibition space, most of them devoted to temporary shows.

The ground floor is currently home to modern works by Slovak artist Milan Pagáč, including a floor-filling neon installation.

The first floor holds a permanent exhibition of the gallery's collection of central European baroque painting and sculpture. Two of its rooms, elaborately wood-panelled, are preserved from the original palace interior. Each of the panels – and there are scores of them – holds a small neoclassical painting, but the overall effect, perhaps due to the dim lighting, is gloomy rather than spectacular.

It is worth persevering through the hundred or so artworks arranged around the floor: towards the end are two (a third is currently on loan to the Louvre in Paris) of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's astonishingly modern 'character heads'. These grimacing bronze busts were created by the artist after he had moved to Bratislava (then Pressburg) in the late 1770s.

Newly opened on the second floor is Temptation, an exhibition of the wide-ranging work of Yuri Dojc. Dojc was born in Czechoslovakia but moved to Canada in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. There he studied photography (initially using a camera sent to him from Slovakia by his father) and later launched a successful artistic and commercial career.

Working on commissions from companies like American Express, Porsche and Panasonic, Dojc simultaneously established a strong international reputation for his nudes, 11 of which are on show here. His other photographic projects have included a study of decaying ancient books, pictures of Rwanda captured during a visit he made there in 2008, and a series of arresting black-and-white urban images labelled City Scapes, as well as his more impressionistic and surreal works. All are represented in this exhibition; the City Scapes images alone justify the gallery's €3.50 entrance fee.

Finally, in the attic, is Moraine, an installation made from discarded pieces of climbing wall which Slovak artist Štefan Papčo has fashioned into boulders and suspended among the palace's roof beams. Mind your head!

Temptation, by Yuri Dojc, is on show at the Mirbach Palace until 30 January, 2011.

James Thomson