Fotograf Magazine

In his work, Svätopluk Mikyta has used reinterpretation and visual comments of discovered reproductions and photographs as a visual platform for a long time. The trained graphic artist flirts and experiments with painting, drawing, installations and video performances combined with photographs and images from the 1930s and 1940s he collected during his travels and exhibitions throughout Europe. He is interested in diverse historical and historizing themes of a social, political or sporting character, often affected by contemporary propaganda and mass culture. To Mikyta, a technically reproduced image is a default platform for visual communication, reflection, and comments on these topics. In the images, history intertwines with the contemporary aesthetic media rhetoric and the targeted, precisely directed advertising. Mikyta layers deposits of time and viewpoints on them to provoke and evoke further mirror reflection of the course of history. His visual language reflects not only the seriousness of situations, but also some irony and subliminal black humour.