Laputa

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 Sám proti Liliputu 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.