Gothic Panel Painting and Plastic Art

In 2020, a reinstallation took place under the direction of curator Jana Luková. This project focused on new visual solutions and involved the replacement of certain original installation elements, while core works were preserved in their initial arrangement. The gallery had acquired the objects from collections of the Bratislava City Museum, and had showcased most of them as early as 1973 in a special exhibition in the Clarissine Church, a venue which still serves as a multifunctional cultural space. Due to their location in the city's collections, many of the sculptures and paintings were initially attributed to local provenance. However, more thorough research has shown that these are diverse works of sacred art emanating from a range of important collections. They are mostly fragments of unpreserved altar architectures that cannot be reconstructed to their original form, and which date from the end of the 13th century until the first third of the 16th century. Although not all illustrate the form of Gothic and early Renaissance art in our country, they do represent the oldest objects in the GMB collection. We should particularly mention the statue of the Vajnorská Madonna and Child – a carving in oak that was probably created in the Regensburg workshop (Eastern Bavaria, Germany), possibly as early as the late 13th century, which was named after the location of its discovery (Vajnory) prior to being purchased for the museum.