Roman Ondak, Untitled (Saturn), 1993

acrylic paint on book cover
12 x 19.1 cm

“This series was one of the first conceptual works of mine, while I just started my second year at the Academy’s painting department. I started working with books, both as a ready-made material, and also with their content. In this series Untitled, I collected dozens of book covers which I cut from useless books and from another groups of books I picked the motifs, which I painted/drew onto them. These motifs were all from my collection of books mostly of a popular science, which I was obsessed by studying during my adolescence period in the 1980’s. During those decades a lot of information in books was censored, or manipulated, what was finally publicly criticised and changed after the fall of communism. Whatever was truth or false in those books, what remained in my memory strongly were the illustrations. So I returned back to those popular science books in 1991, and feeling liberated, I focused on repainting those memorable motifs, having them separated from any of their previous contextual reference”. Roman Ondak

Roman Ondak, Untitled (Saturn), 1993

acrylic paint on book cover
12 x 19.1 cm

“This series was one of the first conceptual works of mine, while I just started my second year at the Academy’s painting department. I started working with books, both as a ready-made material, and also with their content. In this series Untitled, I collected dozens of book covers which I cut from useless books and from another groups of books I picked the motifs, which I painted/drew onto them. These motifs were all from my collection of books mostly of a popular science, which I was obsessed by studying during my adolescence period in the 1980’s. During those decades a lot of information in books was censored, or manipulated, what was finally publicly criticised and changed after the fall of communism. Whatever was truth or false in those books, what remained in my memory strongly were the illustrations. So I returned back to those popular science books in 1991, and feeling liberated, I focused on repainting those memorable motifs, having them separated from any of their previous contextual reference”. Roman Ondak