Peter Uchnár – Laputa (Illustrations from the book Gulliver’s travels)
The Laputa exhibition is the completion of the artist’s work dedicated to the three hundredth anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels. The exhibited works were created for the latest edition of the book (Slovart, 2023) from Uchnár’s illustrations from 1998. More than fifty full-page pictures of the new edition were created from the original acrylic paintings using digital collage and newly painted parts.
The format diversity of the original illustrations, which limited the previous editions, was changed by the artist’s interventions. After the incomplete first edition (VSSS, 1998) and the aforementioned format inconsistency of the second edition (Reader’s Digest, 2008), the third edition represents Uchnár’s completion of this book project. It also includes works created and used for the artist’s past exhibitions with the theme of Gulliver.
In 2011, spatial enlargements of the illustrations were created for the Magic World exhibition (Taipei – Taichung – Kaochung, Taiwan). This experience was developed during the exhibition Alone Against Liliput, (Bibiana, 2015), for which large-format paintings combined with spatial objects were created. Parts of these pictures were used for the cover of the new book.
The third independent resource that was involved in the last edition of the book is the Laputa large-scale digital collage project. It was created after the artist’s experience in creating an animated film for the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival. By experimenting with the details of the background created for the film, combined with the newly painted parts, Uchnár gradually created six versions of this picture. The 2024 version, which is part of this exhibition, is on loan from the Bratislava City Library.
Text: Juraj Žembera
Peter Uchnár (1970) is one of the most successful Slovak illustrators of recent decades. As a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, he was awarded the BIB Golden Apple in 1999 for his debut Gulliver’s Travels, and later he became the only artist in the history of BIB to be awarded the Children’s Jury Prize twice (2009 and 2017).
Among others, he has done the illustrations for Kristínka a svet fantázie (Kristínka and the World of Fantasy), Veľká kniha slovenských rozprávok (The Great Book of Slovak Fairy Tales), and Peter Pan.
In addition to fairy tales, legends, and fantasy stories, he has done illustrations of poetry and prose for adults. He has exhibited his works in Copenhagen, Jakarta, Warsaw, Taipei, Bologna, Tokyo, and many other cities at home and abroad. In 2017 and 2021, he also exhibited at the Danubiana.
