BRANKO SUHY

The endlessly repeated images of the collapsing twin towers of the World Trade Centre and of the burning Pentagon became an integral part of the terrorist attacks perpetrated on September 11, 2001. In a surprising way, the United States encountered something that had long existed in the imagination of Hollywood.

Since 9/11 discourse on the positions adopted by artists and on the responsibilities they should assume has increased sharply. How can one depict a disastrous reality without degenerating into emotive art? Like all citizens of the world, artists realize that the events of that fateful day in New York obviously engender not only horror, but may be repeated again and again. Some argued that artists should not be motivated by outer, topical events; others reacted spontaneously to this new dimension of violence.

The Slovenian artist, Branko Suhy (born in 1950), is among those who did not avert their eyes from the brutal derailing of reason that were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He immediately responded to the catastrophe in New York with powerful etchings, drawings, aquatints, and acrylic paintings. His Manhattan Cycle consists of 146 works to date and comprises forty paintings in acrylic paint on canvas. Of these, the Kunsthistorisches Museum presents ten works in the Theseus-Temple.

In his work the artist alternates between Cubist complexity, Pop Art sarcasm and Minimalist simplicity. He needs neither dull comments nor paralyzingly complex collages on explosions and terror. Suhy’s highly personal, independent view of events characterizes the political dimension of his work. The Twin Towers, the numerals “11” and “9”, the monogram of New York, “NY”, the outline of the island of Manhattan, as well as the colors red and blue and the stars of the American flag - these are the focal points of Suhy’s pictorial meditations and his transformation of these starting points into quotidian objects or into abstract forms.

The primary influence on his powerful pictorial vocabulary of simple every-day objects is the work of Jasper Johns and of other representatives of Pop Art; he is now also a great admirer of Donald Judd, Minimal Art, and Barnett Newman. His reverence for Picasso inspired his expressionistic style.

Branko Suhy, Professor of Graphic Art at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana, is one of the founders of the Biennale of Slovenian Graphic Art in his hometown of Novo Mesto. 1977/78 he spent in Vienna, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts; in 1999/2000 he participated in an important exhibition of prints organized by the Albertina, showing prints from 1973-1999. So far, three large monographs on his paintings have been published.