The Collection of Non-professional Art Expression is a specific SNG collection which contains paintings, plastic art, drawings and graphic art. It was created in 1965 when the International Department of Naïve Art was established. It was founded by Štefan Tkáč, an important theoretician in the area of naïve art and the founder of the international event Triennial of the Naïve Art at the SNG. He was the one who was most responsible for the profiling of this collection.
From the beginning, the aim of the creation of this collection was to concentrate on the works of various figures of naïve art in order to capture other borderline forms of untrained art. The collection was also built as a set of works – the object of research with the aim to reflect the relationship between professional and untrained art, their mutual overlaps and effects. The orientation to the work of non-trained authors relates not only to the search for authenticity in fine art or the return to the roots of creating, but also to the wider question regarding nature, essence and the sense of art in general.
The focus of this collection is the permanent collection of naïve art oriented on the 20th century. Today it contains over 800 works of significant Slovak and foreign naïve artists. This representative selection of over seventy authors represents the techniques and tendencies resonating in Slovak and European naïve art. The poetic-realistic and metaphoric and fantasy forms of naïve art are represented by the works of Slovak culture (Ondrej Šteberl, Anna Ličková, Juraj Lauko, Zuzana Virághová, Július Považan, Ľudovít Kochoľ, Júlia Bartuszová, Mária Žilavá, Štefan Siváň from Slovakia and Martin Jonáš, Zuzana Chalupová, Ján Kňazovic, Ján Sokol from the Slovak enclave in Serbia.) The international part is constituted by works from Central and Western Europe (Václav Beránek, Natalie Schmidtová, Václav Žák, Rudolf Dzurko from the Czech Republic, Lucien Viellard from France , Erich Bödeker and Elisabeth Gevaert from Germany ) and Ivan Rabuzin and Ivan Lacković from Croatia and others).
The acquisition programme is also oriented on art brut and the art of outsiders with the aim to capture other original forms of non-trained fine art. Significant works of important authors of these movements and schools of non-trained art of the 20th and 21st century (Nikifor, Justyna Matysiak from Poland, Yeshayahu Scheinfeld from Israel, Kiymet Benita Bock from Turkey, Anna Zemánková from the Czech Republic, Ogjen Jeremic from Serbia, Gérard Sendrey, Claudine Goux and Adam Nidzgorski from France, Vasilij Romanenkov from Russia and Eva Droppová from Slovakia, and others) were acquired through donations thanks to the inter4national event Triennial of Naïve Art entitled Insita, which the SNG revived in 1994.
The collection also features other borderline phenomena: folk art in Slovakia, particularly from the 19th century with an emphasis on traditional folk painting and plastic art. The collection of folk art contains over 500 works.
Curator of the Naïve Art Collection: Katarína Čierna
