Oskár Čepan Award 2014 – Martin Kochan

“In the beginning of my art work I was devoted to political art in public space; I was inspired mostly by the work of action artists of the so called Eastern Bloc. I was thinking about art first and foremost as a set of aesthetical, political and social points of view and individual outputs. Since 2010 I have actively collaborated with the artist Cyril Blažo, later I have started to collaborate with Tomáš Beňadik and a few non-artists. Humor and banality are important dimensions of my works; I combine them in a peculiar way and encode them into new contexts. On one hand, it is an honest analytical conceptual work, on the other hand, it is an unfocused ‘freestyle’ hybrid process of creation with a multitude of outputs encompassing even the field of social media and Internet and oscillating between monumental and momental. My work can’t be considered today to be one, self-consistent sign – ‘logos.’
I strive rather for the communication in its broadest meaning by virtue of my own, more hybrid language and across media.”
Martin Kochan (born 1981, Trnava, SK) is a graduate of the Faculty of Education, Trnava University and the Studio of Figurative Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts VUT in Brno under the supervision of doc. Michal Gabriel, academic sculptor. He is a sculptor, activist, performer, photographer, sportsman and a fan of healthy diet. He lives and works in Trnava.

www.martinkochan.com