Along with artists such as Roman Ondák and Boris Ondreiča. Cyril Blažo is part of a younger generation of post-conceptual artists, who, over the last decade, have been definitive for a lively and aspiring scene in Slovakia. His interests lie in the almost endless visual wealth of media images, which he reconfigures with diverse methods into new, pointedly ironic formulations in his work.

Starting point and basis of Blažo’s artwork is his everyday practice of collecting. Images, newspapers and magazines, photos, illustrations and books are piled on top of each other in his studio, digital images crowd his desktop. Blažo’s mode of collecting has thereby little in common with the conscientious and orderly method of an archivist, one should rather imagine it as a permanent, nearly manic accumulation of material, which is only beholden to the momentary and flighty fascinations of the subject.

Cyril Blažo’s art is an art of the secondary order – it reaps what it did not sow, as Vladko Beskyd puts it. In whichever medium, Blažo’s conceptions are never creations out of nothing; they are rather permeated with the societal pool of our

visual archives and media semantics before congealing into a newly arranged order. They pick up on established material, translate the non-relational into new relations, manipulate found imagery with minimal interference and additions, or content themselves with a mere enlargement or turn of an existing image. Even his own works regularly become subject to this economy of visual recycling. On the whole, Cyril Blažo pursues in his work a micro-politics of minimal aesthetic interventions, wrestling back from the stereotypical languages of the media the laughing third persons's ethical space of freedom.

Cyril Blažo (*1970) lives and works in Bratislava. In collaboration with tranzit.sk (Bratislava), Kunstverein München presents Cyril Blažo’s first institutional solo show outside Slovakia, drawing together work that spans the last 15 years of his career.