A guided tour with commentary of Marie Bartuszová’s solo exhibition – Being Nature – with the exhibition’s curator and art historian Gabriela Garlatyová.

The exhibition focuses on key tactile puzzles made of plaster, as well as aluminium and bronze, designed to be touched and assembled. It also presents Bartuszová as a sculptor who has created works for public spaces, particularly in eastern Slovakia, in Košice, Rožňava, Revúca, Tatranská Lomnica and Vyšné Ružbachy. The tactile puzzles came into their own during one of the first workshops of their kind in Slovakia. They were designed for visually impaired children from the Primary School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Levoča in 1976 and 1983. Gabriel Kladek organised and documented these workshops. The exhibition therefore explores the performative perception of art through workshop activities that illustrate Bartuszová’s intention to create art connected to everyday life.

A special summer guided tour of the solo exhibition by Marie Bartuszová – Being Nature – with the exhibition’s curator and art historian Gabriela Garlatyová and GMB director Katarína Trnovská.

The exhibition focuses on key tactile puzzles made of plaster, as well as aluminium and bronze, designed to be touched and assembled. It also presents Bartuszová as a sculptor who has created works for public spaces, particularly in eastern Slovakia, in Košice, Rožňava, Revúca, Tatranská Lomnica and Vyšné Ružbachy. The tactile puzzles came into their own during one of the first workshops of their kind in Slovakia. They were designed for visually impaired children from the Primary School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Levoča in 1976 and 1983. Gabriel Kladek organised and documented these workshops. The exhibition therefore explores the performative perception of art through workshop activities that illustrate Bartuszová’s intention to create art connected to everyday life.

Power rarely operates today through explicit authority. More often, it functions subtly—through images, language, everyday gestures, family rituals, cultural traditions, and aesthetic norms that we gradually come to accept as natural. It is precisely this subtlety that gives it its force. What appears self-evident eventually ceases to be questioned. External structures slowly become internal convictions.

Soft Power examines precisely this process. Rather than focusing on power as a political instrument or on its visible institutions, the exhibition explores the mechanisms through which social expectations become inscribed into the body, memory, identity, and interpersonal relationships. Here, power does not manifest itself through prohibition or command. It operates through repetition, representation, and the routines of everyday life. It shapes our understanding of what it means to be a woman, to belong to a community, to construct an image of oneself, or to inhabit one’s own body.

The four artists approach these questions from distinct perspectives, yet together their works form a remarkably coherent whole. They do not seek to illustrate a single curatorial thesis. Instead, each reveals a different manifestation of the same phenomenon: the moment when social norms cease to appear external and become embedded within our own ways of seeing, feeling, and experiencing the world.

This exhibition of professional female artists working with ceramics, porcelain and fireclay traces their shared and individual artistic journeys, ranging from functional to fine art.

The exhibition was supported by the Arts Support Fund.

‘Subjective Seismograph’ Hronský finds the observation and listening to all visible and invisible movements fascinating. For him, therefore, sound is visual and vice versa. He sees an inseparable connection between them, which he demonstrates particularly in his drawings. One form of this is an improvised transcription of heard music. Over time, this has evolved into a more contemplative transcription of his own field recordings, inspired by spectrograms of sound. The individual shapes often mimic symbols in which Hronský finds the visual potential to construct typographic systems. At his very first solo exhibition in Bratislava, visitors can encounter an extensive realisation of such a system, created specifically for TypospoT.

As part of the opening, Richard will perform a special set as an extension of his installation. In addition to live electronic processing of the fujara and whistles, the artist will also play field recordings ‘from his rucksack’. The sound will be projected in real time via a spectrogram (a visual representation of sound).

Richard Hronský is a transdisciplinary artist whose interests span a broad spectrum, from visual art and experimental music to the collective organisation of DIY exhibitions and concerts. He plays the fujara and has released the album Pohreb, which was nominated for the Radio_Head Awards 2025. Richard is a dynamic figure on the Bratislava scene – alongside studying Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU), he performs regularly both at home and abroad. In his work, he recontextualises traditions and reflects on imagination and memory. He draws every day, often illustrates posters and enjoys archiving.

*A new installation from the series I, Too, Am a Bratislava Native* has been added to the courtyard of the Old Town Hall.***

The latest installation, on display from 21 July, explores the life and work of Bratislava-born Arthur Fleischmann, who went on to become an internationally renowned sculptor.

Arthur Fleischmann was born in 1896. During the interwar period, he exhibited regularly in Bratislava, and his early works – portraits, figurative sculptures and ceramic pieces – remain in the collections of the Bratislava City Museum to this day.

In 1938, he left Central Europe and his life’s journey took him across several continents. Bratislava, however, remained an important part of his personal and artistic story. After the Second World War, he settled in London, where he made his mark as a pioneer in the artistic use of Plexiglas.

The installation in the courtyard of the Old Town Hall includes a portrait bust of the Viennese actress Julie Janssen, dating from 1932. In his works, Fleischmann depicted figures from the cultural world as well as people from his immediate surroundings. He presented the bust of Julie Janssen at the anniversary exhibition of the Bratislava Art Society in 1934.