Jozef Jankovič was born in Bratislava in 1937. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava between 1956 and 1962, under Professor Jozef Kostka. His early practice, inspired by nouveau réalism, is best described as sculpture and is intimately open to public spaces and their architectonic components. Before graduating, he already enjoyed a steadily growing reputation, having exhibited work in his native country as well as in Hungary, Poland, Italy and France. Rapidly, however, Jankovič experienced political pushback regarding his work and was blacklisted after the Prague Spring and the period of normalisation (he got expelled from the National Union of Artists). Rather than let himself be silenced and discouraged, Jankovič began to explore censorship and authoritarian interventionism in culture and media in his work.
As a result of censorship, Jankovič learned new practices, such as computer graphics, image manipulation and even jewellery.
This began as early as 1968, when Jankovič rebelled against common practices during official demonstrations in which citizens were encouraged to hold up depictions of the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. In Private Manifestation, Jankovič replaced the expected political figures with a pop art self-portrait – the chosen style of which is in direct opposition to socialist realism – mounted atop a sculpted body serving as a base. Censorship and the cult of personality were early targets of Jankovič’s art, which stood up for the anonymous masses under strict rule.
His fight continued in 1972 with his first architectural and dystopic series that took an ironic view of the process of normalisation in Czechoslovakia. He equated places of isolation, such as prisons, interrogation rooms and torture chambers with government buildings, including their offices and waiting rooms. This series also introduced one of Jankovič main motifs: that of the human figure. Here reduced to mere numbers, the human beings become omnipresent, either whole or fragmented into dismembered limbs.
The morbid appeal of Jankovič’s work grew hand in hand with his politicisation. The heaviness of his subjects is alleviated by an absurd but still tragic levity. His characters, far from being passive, attempt to resist their often-crushing fates, but to little avail. In response to the lies of propaganda art, he depicted his figures not as the heroes that they were usually described as, but as the victims that they had become. From his own experiences, his support for human rights crossed borders and he stood up for the oppressed, voiceless and marginalised, from wherever they came.
Jankovič was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava from 1994 to 2007.
He passed away in 2017.
