Exhibitions & events

The exhibition Heroes' Prop Room presents the results of long-term artistic research focused on former and contemporary military spaces in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Through a complex, multimedia installation of a series of videos, objects, and images, Radovan Čerevka reflects on and relates transformations of the functions, uses, and perceptions of a particular cultural landscape.

The works from the Bratislava City Gallery´s collection included in the permanent exposition represent the Central European art of the eighteenth century. Selected paintings and sculptures provide a comprehensive overview of art production in Bratislava in the Baroque period, put in a broader, Central European context.

The Archbishop's Winter Palace, in its current classicist form known as the Primatial Palace, was built by Archbishop Jozef Batthyány (1727–1799). It was completed in 1781 and belonged to Hungarian Primates until 1903, when church leaders sold it to the town. The Primatial Palace is closely connected with the history of Bratislava City Gallery, which was located there until 1975 and regularly held temporary exhibitions in the current Justi Hall on its ground floor. Prior to reconstruction of the building in 1986, the city's art collections were installed in various arrangements, mainly within state rooms on the first floor.

The Graphics Cabinets form the interior decoration in two rooms on the first floor of Mirbach Palace, having probably been commissioned by one of the original owners of the building. They are exceptional not only for their rococo stucco decorated ceilings, but also for wooden panelling into which are embedded 290 graphic sheets, engravings, etchings and mezzotints from the second half of the 17th and 18th centuries that have been secondarily coloured by unknown authors.

The installation Totems comprises a series of five unique sculptures made of burnt books on concrete bases. Individual book titles are not recognisable, however, as in the process of burning they merged into a complete sculptural work that reflect wellknown geometric forms, for example Brancusi’s pedestal sculptures, and in terms of content is connected with social utopias in the tradition of artistic avant-gardes of futurism or constructivism. Authors who systematically analyse regimes of patriarchally constructed female representation work with books as symbols of literacy, a purportedly masculine and unquestionable sign of progress. From the books, which form majestic objects in a new vertical arrangement and suggest the fragility of burning, they created irrational, difficult to verbalise, totemic figures of the language of the sculptural work.