curator: Kristýna Jirátová

White & Weiss Gallery opens 2025 with an exhibition by the renowned Slovak artist Martin Gerboc, already his third solo presentation in this gallery. The exhibition offers a glimpse of Gerboc’s introspective and emotionally charged work, which combines dark cynicism and hidden anxiety, revealing elements of the grotesque and perverse. His paintings draw us into a world of ostensible light-heartedness, where an unmistakable combination of fragility and raw reality dwells beneath a mask of frenetic laughter.

However, in the backdrop of a pictorial scene, the artist does not necessarily appear in  his own face. He hides under a grimace – a mask of the protagonist and the ensemble of secondary characters -, or unseen and hidden, he observes the events on the stage from behind the curtain. The works, many of which have been created for this exhibition, are carefully thought out and are rich in artistic, philosophical, literary and cinematic references. Familiarity with these specific sources of inspirations is not a must, viewers will still feel a strange whiff of something sinister. Gerboc’s contemporary pictorial realm is primarily steeped in cynicism, a world that cries out in which the artist, as one of his own characters, sneers and derides through the make up roughly smeared across the face of the artist-actor on the stage of this restless and cynical theatre.

Martin Gerboc (b.1971, Bratislava) lives and works in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, completed internships at the S. R. University of Pennsylvania in the USA and the Institute of Visual Communication at the Kolding School of Design in Denmark. He started his postgraduate studies at the Institute, completing them at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. For several years he worked as a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, authored several books of philosophical essays and essays on painting, created several music videos for gothic and punk bands sa well as several independent short film projects.