Matej Krén‘s work is remarkable for its exceptional scope. In recent years his distinctive approach to sculpture, object, installation, drawing, print, painting, action art, film, music, sound and word has attracted attention at many prestigious international art shows.
His work not only touches on very contemporary problems, such as erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and the present, but also on classic themes in art – the relation between inner and outer, the part and the whole. Typical of his work is a searching for a complexity of content expressed in a monumental and comprehensible language.
Since 1990 Matej Krén developed a broad and recognized international artistic career. After studying Fine Arts in Bratislava and Prague between 1977 and 1985, he established his residence in Bratislava until 1997, the year he moves to Prague, where he currently lives.
Works of his such as Gravity Mixer, Omfalos e Idiom were already distinguished with important awards. For example, nominations such as the UNESCO Special Prize 1995 for the Promotion of the Arts and the TatraBanka Prize in 2004, in Slovakia.
Book cell
Centro de Arte Moderna – Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian
Lisbon, Portugal, 2006
The Book Cell Project, which was installed in the CAMJAP’s Hall, repeats the recurring procedure, in the work of this artist, of piling up thousands of books, creating an architectonic structure where we are invited to step inside.
The metaphor indicating that all those books are part of and enrich the universal editorial production, gains visibility in the blend orchestrated in the construction of Book Cell, between the Foundation’s publications and several other books from around the world.
Passage
book dwellings
City gallery of Bratislava
The “Passage” represents a kind of symbolic “short cut across the world” in which we exist or dwell: through the factual, real world into the world of human culture, where reality is exchanged for another – virtual – reality, for the reality of word, text, sign, symbol, image, and back again.
The project itself is a metaphorical synthesis of a number of formal semantic elements: an entrance, a path, “endless walls” of books, mirrors, light, an exit and even the physical presence of the viewers themselves. Here, viewers change from “passive” observers into actors that help form the work’s symbolic and semantic aspects.
In 1998 Matej Kren installed a “tower of books” entitled Idiom in the entrance hall of the Prague Municipal Library.
Rotunda made of books, Gravity Mixer, was a key part of the Czech pavilion at EXPO 2000 in Hanover.
Omphalos 2005
