Peter Bartoš
Born in 1938, 1938 and lives in Bratislava
Peter Bartoš is a living legend of Slovak conceptual art, one of the lasts living witnesses of the key events of our visual culture. His art is of totalitarian nature, organically bound with his everyday life. From 1955 to 1960 he studied at The Secondary School of Applied Arts in Bratislava. 1960–66 painting at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. In 1965 he has ostentatiously abandoned traditional painting in an act of donating all his existing works to invited friends. He started to understand the painting as a process, was preoccupied with the concentration of matter – the physical properties of the materials – its disaffiliation, accumulation or dispersal packing. Subsequently he turned to more conceptual outcomes – textual statements and sketches. 1979-1990 he was an employee of Bratislava’s ZOO – responsible for the design of several environments for the animals and numerous parks and ponds also out of the ZOO. Nature has been the key source of inspiration since his childhood. For a long part of his artistic practice he was deeply concerned with the formation or creation of an ecological culture.
