Visual Cleansing with the Soft Lines of Martin Moflár

Martin Moflár, born in 1975, has his first solo exhibition at the East Slovak Gallery in Košice, featuring a selection of his work from the past ten years and his recent Soft Lines series. Kontur’s on-site video presents the exhibition in detail.

Martin Moflár graduated from the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University of Košice with a degree in printmaking and experimental printmaking. He belongs to the middle generation of the artists’ group known as the kassai kör (the Košice Circle). As Miroslav Kleban points out in his curatorial text, the special feature of his current exhibition, Soft Lines, is that it evokes a kind of spiritual experience in the spacious, monumental cellars of the East Slovak Gallery.

According to the curator, this is partly due to the oversaturation of contemporary visual culture. Moflár’s pared-down minimalist lines, organically sloping canvases and monumental scale evoke softness and simplicity but also a powerful visual experience.

According to Kleban, Moflár’s works give rise to a new type of sacral iconographic interpretation. Indeed, the scale, shape and undulation of the paintings may remind us of the intentions of the Baroque period, when churches sought to impress their audiences with monumental visuality. However, the images of Soft Lines avoid direct impact but rather evoke a desire for simplicity and presence. As this text suggests, Moflár’s abstract images paradoxically communicate an indescribable world of emotions to the viewer.