and All That is Left Are Stories by Jana Machatová and Peter Machata

Artist list

Peter Machata, Jana Machatova

Jewelry as an autonomous artistic discipline began to emerge in the second half of the 20^th century and by the 1960s it could be felt on a pan-European scale. For obvious reasons, a silent or better to say, introverted development appeared in former Czechoslovakia, where the name of Anton Cepka – the jeweler who along with sculptors Erna Masarovičová and Alina Ferdinandy, opened the door to design jewelry in Slovakia, began to resonate in the early 1960s. Thus, thanks to him, Slovak jewelry became an important spot on the world map of artistic jewelry. And when specialized studios for design and applied arts were established at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava after 1990, it was Cepka who brought to life the university specialization of jewelry in Slovakia. He was the head of the jewelry studio until 1994 when he was succeeded by Karol Weisslechner, who continues to hold this position today.

Jana Machatová is one of the first Slovak fine artists who completed the study of jewelry at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (under Cepka and Weisslechner). During her time there, she underwent a geometrizing and kinetic episode under Cepka’s influence; however, she soon shifted her attention to the theme of memory. She works on this theme in mutually interconnected layers – through her own story, touched up by retrospective optimism and through commentaries, which provide a bitter (or) realistic crown on sweet childhood times.  Thus, the accent on personal, family or fantasy memory traces developed in the form of medallions in laminated photography or in carved silver sheets alternates by tuning in to a wider context. In her jewelry, Socialist Czechoslovakia marches with various attributes – badges of children’s pioneer organizations, prefabricated housing developments, barbed wire. Party leaders kissing, Spartakiad games, happy workers and merry children are a more telling description of the socialist era – in the sense of the artist’s sentimental-ironic poetics, they are frequently accompanied by a luxurious golden background and bucolic blueprint motifs. Another layer, to which she revisits with intermissions, is connected to the narrative provided by old postcards and newspapers, in her latest series focusing on, but not exclusively, the history of women’s crafts.

Peter Machata, a graduate of Jozef Jankovič’s sculpture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava began to concentrate on jewelry after completing his studies. He perceives jewelry as small sculptures, and thus consistently and consequently builds the syntax of his jewelry based on the principles of relief, plastic formation and box.  His jewelry reflects subtle overlaps of jewelry and sculpture methods – his geometric and poetizing abstraction was replaced by figurative metaphor several years ago. He elaborated the elements of religiousness (or spirituality?), which he established in his jewelry by basing them on the iconography of the Pieta, in a new heretical method in the collection of Saintly Relics (boxes with realistically depicted fingers with engagement rings) accenting the topic of marriage. He likes to work in a participative manner, at times by reconstructing jewelry designed by a different artist, at other times, including the potential bearer in his cooperative game, most recently in a series of provocative amulets/talismans. For many years he worked mainly in silver, but today plastic/corian, which allows him to do sophisticated experiments by using a CNC milling machine and scanner, plays a substantial role in his work.


Exhibition text by Viera Kleinová.