Peter Sceranka – The Secret of Air

Opening: 28. 10. 2026, 18.00 Curator: Lucia Gavulová Exhibition dates: 29. 10. 2026 – 28. 2. 2027 Hall C, Hlavná 27, Košice

Earlier this year, visual artist Pavla Sceranková asked me whether I would consider curating an exhibition of her father, the artist Peter Sceranka (1955 – 1999), at Východoslovenská galéria in Košice. Peter Sceranka was a trained sculptor whose practice developed in parallel across painting, drawing, collage and sculpture. He was artistically active intensively in the 1980s and 1990s. I accepted this offer with humility and joy, not only because of the exceptional qualities of his work, but also because of the affinity I feel for the family cohesion of his wife and four children – Pavla, Lucie, Zuzana and Matúš Sceranka, all of whom devote themselves to artistic and creative work.

For the exhibition of Peter Sceranka at Východoslovenská galéria (hereinafter VSG), where his solo exhibition already took place in 2008 (Peter Sceranka, curated by Vladimír Beskid), its architectural conception is decisive. Architecture is, in the end, a strongly present element in the Sceranka family. Besides son Matúš, Pavla and above all Peter's wife Zuzana Sceranková also work with it. For the exhibition at VSG, which takes place in a narrow, longitudinally oriented space without daylight, the load-bearing element is a wooden structure of a head, divided into a series of frames that hover along the central axis of the room. „I often think about how to grasp the exhibition. An image came to me where the head, in sections of wooden frames, is spread along the room, while drawings and small sculptures are placed in the individual sections/frames,“ Pavla wrote in a message from 15 May 2026. This idea was ultimately realised.

The family had already worked with the motif of the head as an architectural element at the exhibition V hlavě Petra Sceranky (2022 – 2023) in the Prague community space Olga, where it took the form of a compact suspended structure. In the Košice exhibition, the head is unfolded into a series of spatial sections that pass through the centre of the elongated room. The construction is open and permeable. This openness can also be understood as a reference to the fact that Peter Sceranka's work is not entirely closed. Not only because his life ended prematurely, but also because his work continues in some way through the artistic activity of his children and family. The individual frames can also be understood as symbolic echoes or signals that remain present, spread through the space and acquire new meanings.

The head is, moreover, one of the recurring motifs of Sceranka's own work. As a person and an artist, he was intensively immersed in his own inner world. His studio, in which, according to the recollections of those closest to him, he spent a great deal of time in focused work, could also be considered a metaphor for the head. Pavla Sceranková's wish was to use the permeable wooden structure and the concentration of individual works to achieve an experience of intensity – a culmination of thoughts, impulses and impressions that swirl in swarms and persistently occupy the mind. To such an extent that the viewer at times loses the ability to distinguish where one image ends and another begins.

The impression of swarming, culmination and openness is also supported by the formal character of the individual works on paper. The line layers, thickens, interrupts and disperses. Structures emerge that blur the boundaries between inner and outer, full and empty, material and immaterial. Drawing approaches are diverse. When Sceranka draws figures, he does so mostly in hints that appear and vanish. Anatomical associations pass into abstract configurations, organic forms intertwine with geometric and spatial constructions. The pictorial space does not follow a stable perspective order, but arises as a changing field of relations in which individual interventions attract, overlap or move away from one another.

Colour interventions, planar accents and collage fragments enter the drawing without creating a clearly hierarchical composition. Colour is not merely an addition to the line or a means of modelling…