The Old Tree, Circa 2022

Milan Laciak  

I was born in 1958 in Rožňava, Slovakia. I wanted to become a painter since I was a little boy. I drew a lot, sent my pictures to exhibitions and won an international competition in Berlin in the 1970s. That decided my studies at the Secondary Art School in Košice, Slovakia.

Not everything in life is as simple as the dreams of unencumbered children's eyes. I never came to terms with the regime of normalized Czechoslovakia, which the totalitarian regime did not forgive me for. I paid for it with my academic ambitions. In 1977, I graduated from the High School of Art Industry in Košice - majoring in ceramics, but other doors have already closed for me. Our collective exhibition of paintings in Košice, which our "leadership" did not accept and evaluated as anti-state, also contributed to this.

Fine art, however, still lived inside me and continuously made itself known in the form of ceramics, which I devoted myself to for nearly 30 years, but I also painted alongside it.

My work is mostly focused on landscapes, but also figures and portraits. I only try to paint the contours of my authentic story on canvas, which is why the individual periods of my work are so diverse in their thematic breadth and visual representation. Sometimes my paintings are characterized by a dynamic compositional vortex, other times the rhythm calms down and a fragile balance prevails.

Painting is unbridled sensuality!

I exhibited in: Košice SK (1977), Trenčín SK (1979), Hradec Králové CZ (1980), Žatec CZ (1981), Pilsen CZ (1982), Rožňava SK (2002), Ostrava CZ (2013), Vranov nad Topľou SK (2022), Rožňava SK (2023).