The exhibition presents the ART FOND Collection from Bratislava, in which the neo-avant-garde strategies of late modernism remain urgently relevant today. Rather than a closed historical phenomenon, the neo-avant-garde appears here as a lasting mode of resistance, critical thinking, and civic responsibility, continuously reactivated in contemporary artistic practice.
The exhibition title, borrowed from a work by Kristián Németh, functions as a political and ethical proposition. It asserts that art grounded in freedom, critical awareness, and the courage to question power structures cannot reach an endpoint. In times marked by renewed ideological pressure, cultural censorship, and the erosion of institutional autonomy, the idea of “no end” becomes a statement against closure, silencing, and historical amnesia. A subtle counterpoint is formed by recurring motifs of infinity, continuity, and cyclical return across several works in the collection.
The curatorial concept is built on dialogues and constellations across generations. Works by artists of different ages are brought together in pairs and triads, not to illustrate influence or stylistic succession, but in order for the spectator to have a better sense of the dialogue between the works as well as the tension and solidarity. Apparent formal or ideological oppositions often reveal shared concerns: the body as a site of political inscription, memory as a form of resistance, the trace as evidence of lived experience, and transcendence as a strategy of inner freedom in conditions of external constraint.
Rejecting linear chronology and fixed stylistic categories, the exhibition adopts a topological approach. Art is understood as a relational field whose core values – freedom of expression, ethical stance, and critical imagination – persist despite deformation, displacement, or repression. Within this framework, the neo-avant-garde is not approached as a historical style, but as a state of mind that continues to inform conceptual, intermedia, feminist, ecological, and activist positions in contemporary art.
In the End There Will Be No End affirms art’s capacity to act as a space of freedom, critique, and ethical imagination. In a contemporary atmosphere shaped by polarization, cultural precarity, and the instrumentalization of history, the exhibition insists that art with a clear stance does not disappear. It adapts, survives, and continues to speak. There will be no end, because the need for artistic freedom has no end.
About the ART FOND Collection
The ART FOND COLLECTION is a private, non-profit collection of contemporary visual art established as a collecting and cultural project (initiated more than ten years ago). It focuses on collecting, preserving, and presenting key tendencies in provenance of art in Slovakia and, in a broader perspective, in East Central Europe, from the 1960s to the present. This private collection preserves works that have often emerged outside official structures and continues to support artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives and normative frameworks.
Over the years, the ART FOND COLLECTION has evolved into an independent platform shaped by sustained curatorial practice, collaboration, and engagement with artists and art contexts.
Curators: Katarína Bajcurová and Lucia Gregorová Stach
The exhibition is organized by Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest and the ART FOND Collection, Bratislava, in cooperation with the Art Research Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
Exhibiting artists: Milan Adamčiak, Peter Bartoš, Juraj Bartusz, Maria Bartuszová, Milan Dobeš, Andrej Dúbravský, Svetlana Fialová, Stano Filko, Daniel Fischer, Martin Gerboc, Milan Grygar, Vladimír Havrilla, Jozef Jankovič, Magdaléna Jetelová, Peter Kalmus, Igor Kalný, Kryštof Kintera, Michal Kern, Július Koller, Milan Knížák, Matej Krén, Jaroslav Kyša, Otis Laubert, Denisa Lehocká, Karel Malich, Juraj Meliš, Alex Mlynárčik, Ilona Németh, Kristián Németh, Roman Ondak, Štefan Papčo, Emília Rigová / Bari Raklori, Peter Roller, Rudolf Sikora, Ivana Šáteková, Erik Šille, Lucia Tallová, Dezider Tóth / Monogramista T.
