Visible from Distance

Ivo Škuta's paintings attract the viewer primarily through their seemingly ironic humor, which Ivo uses to draw attention to the themes of human fear, love, loneliness, melancholy, and awkwardness. In his works, he often stylizes characters and, moreover, objects, assigning them intimate details. In his most recent works, the artist has also focused on the technique of relief, which highlights these themes. With his paintings, Ivo Škuta tells stories from our world, which is evolving faster every day and can disappear just as quickly. Ivo, therefore, allows us to pause for a moment at his memories.

The objects by Šimon Szabo represent not only the sculpture tradition but rely on the history of man as an inspirational medium as well. The concept of the sculptural objects also draws on the history of gender relations, by which the author is intensely fascinated. In the artwork of this contemporary middle-generation sculptor, we can also observe the interconnection of organic lines, which the author artificially creates and places in a shared context with the material of marble and concrete. Šimon, like Ivo, works with several essential themes. For Šimon, these are primarily relationality, sexuality, and, for him, the utterly essential anatomy of the human body.

Both artists are prominent personalities in the contemporary Ostrava art scene. The connection between Ivo Škuta and Šimon Sazbo is primarily the result of the interconnection of joint ideas, which both artists address in themselves and subsequently in their separate artistic outputs. At first glance, one can see the mutual material sophistication and stylization that strictly expresses the essential ideas. Additionally, both artists represent one generation.

Ivo Škuta's body of work has his feet firmly on the ground, while Šimon Szabo connects that ground with cosmic aesthetics and floats lightly above our shared everyday reality.

Ivo Škuta (1989, Frýdek-Místek) studied at the painting studio under the guidance of doc. MgA. František Kowolowski at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava. After graduation, he focused mainly on his free work, which concentrated on painting and drawing. Ivo Škuta is an artist that draws and comes from where he has lived for a long time. That is the Ostrava Přívoz and Zábřeh. So naturally, the remarkable life in these parts of the city influenced him greatly, especially in the terminology and iconography of his works.

Šimon Szabo (1988, Žilina) graduated from the sculpture studio under the guidance of doc. Mgr. Jaroslav Koléšek, ArtD. at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava. He has participated in several internships abroad, which undoubtedly influenced his current work. The author considers his apprenticeship with the sculptor of Czech origin, Vladimír Škoda, in Paris a pivotal experience. Slowly, Šimon Szabo's work has been moving away from traditional sculptural media to experimenting with different contemporary materials.