Maja Fowkes

Reuben Fowkes

A groundbreaking introduction to the contemporary art of central and Eastern Europe, this wide-ranging study explores painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and conceptual work. In this pathbreaking new history, Maja and Reuben Fowkes introduce outstanding artworks and major figures from across central and Eastern Europe to reveal the movements, theories, and styles that have shaped artistic practice since 1950. They emphasize the particularly rich and varied art scenes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, extending their gaze at intervals to East Germany, Romania, the Baltic states, and the rest of the Balkans. This generously illustrated overview explores the richness of this region’s artists’ singular contribution to recent art history. Tracing art-historical changes from 1950 to now, the authors examine the repercussions of political events on artistic life—notably the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the collapse of the communist bloc. But their primary interest is in the experimental art of the neo-avant-garde that resisted official agendas and engaged with global currents such as performance art, video, multimedia, and net art. Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 is a comprehensive, transnational survey of the major movements of art from this region.

Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (World of Art)

This book examines the approaches of renowned Central European artists to the natural environment, uncovering an up till now largely unrecognized aspect of their work, which has regularly been analyzed through socio-political contexts, but rarely in terms of ecology. It focuses on the period after 1968, which not only brought changes to the political landscape of Eastern Europe, but shifted artistic practice towards conceptualism and was instrumental in spreading environmental consciousness. It comparatively investigates artists and artist groups from Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, at the moment when art exited the gallery and entered the natural environment, while socialist governments attempted to keep control over information about the real state of environmental pollution and block globally emerging ecological discourse. Apart from embedding artistic production in social, political and environmental histories of the region, this book also addresses the problem of art history as a discipline under socialism, presents a more complete picture of its neo-avant-garde art and constitutes an unprecedented application of the ecological paradigm to art history. It demonstrates the creativity, inventiveness and astuteness of Central European artists whose vision could not be controlled by any imposed borders at the dawn of global awareness of ecological crisis.

Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism

The Green Bloc

Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes’s innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, 'The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism' brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the Central European artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.

Matthew S. Witkovsky

Václav Macek

Jolana Havelková

Eugénia Sikorová

Sám s fotografiou

Rudolf Sikora

In this path-breaking new history, Maja and Reuben Fowkes introduce outstanding artworks and major figures from across central and eastern Europe to reveal the movements, theories and styles that have shaped artistic practice since 1950. They emphasize the particularly rich and varied art scenes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, extending their gaze at intervals to East Germany, Romania, the Baltic states and the rest of the Balkans. While politics in the region have been marked by unstable geography and dramatic transitions, artists have forged a path of persistent experiment and innovation. This generously illustrated overview explores the richness of their singular contribution to recent art history. Tracing art-historical changes from the short-lived unison of the socialist realist period to the incredible diversity of art in the post-communist era, the authors examine the repercussions of political events on artistic life notably the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the collapse of the communist bloc. But their primary interest is in the experimental art of the neo-avant-garde that resisted official agendas and engaged with global currents such as performance art, video, multimedia and net art.

Central and Eastern European Art

Ilona Nemeth

A look, through the work of Ilona Németh, at the transitioning social and economic infrastructure of Eastern Europe. The dramaturgy of neo-liberal capitalism's spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe appears today in the wake of the financial and political crises of the last decade, refracted in a new light. Taking as its starting point artist Ilona Németh's multifaceted investigation of the de-industrializing history of Slovak sugar refineries in the post-communist period, this collective volume brings together critical and artistic reassessments of the processes of social and economic transformation, the dislocation and re-composition of labor relations and working practices, as well as the disintegration and rekindling of notions of community and social well-being. Challenging the inevitability of the adoption of the western capitalist system, it examines how, in the rush to uproot the institutions and structures of socialism, the communitarian, microeconomic, and ecological potentialities of non-capitalist modes of living have been lost or endangered. The literal and metaphorical ruins of Eastern Sugar also offer themselves as a site to extend and expand upon the discussion of economic forces to incorporate environmental and decolonial approaches, for example present in the parallels and discrepancies between colonial and neo-colonial histories in the disparate geographies of sugar beet and sugar cane production. Through newly commissioned texts, conversations and focused contributions by artists, critics and curators, the publication Eastern Sugar restores complexity to the history of the rapid decline of the Slovak sugar industry, and by extension the entire social and economic infrastructure of transition in Central Europe, while at the same time opening up planetary trajectories for post-capitalist alternatives. copublished with Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava Contributors Edit András, Ayesha Hameed, Brian Holmes, Joanna Sokolowska and Nick Srnicek, Ilona Németh, Annalee Davis, Aaron Cesar, Kathrin Böhm, Matthew Smith, Sidney W. Mintz, Dusan Janiček, Christian Laur, Jane Rendell, Cooking Sections, Anetta Mona Chisa, Ferenc Grof, Raluca Voinea

Maja Fowkes

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