Laco Teren (*1960)
Hatto, 1994
installation, 5 egg-shaped objects, approx. 90 x 60 cm
gift from the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in 1994
The strategy of working with signs and their semantics that Laco Teren utilized in his eighties neo-expressionist paintings remains prevalent in his works from the nineties. He was the only one from the contemporary generation of artists who used sign language based on the attributes of socialism (hammer and sickle, wheatear, gears) although these were used mostly as paraphrases or with the purpose to deliberately empty their meaning, working only with their forms.
During the following decade, the iconography of his paintings reflects typical, rather negative nuances of the transforming society on the threshold of democracy and the symptoms correlated to it. The author introduced the installation Hatto at the exhibition Marginalia, which was the II. Anniversary exhibition of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art (Museum of Art Žilina, 1994). The perfect “design” form of the award-winning egg-shape object, which can be put in motion, corresponds with the retreat, even stark installations of the first wave of neo-conceptual art through the embodiment of the theme, expressing an ambiguous attitude towards consumerism and the world flooded with goods and products. On the one hand, the costly metallic paint symbolizes a certain fascination, on the other, though, the devil horns warn against it.
