Palo Macho, painter, glass-maker, pedagogue and poet (1966) is one of the most distinctive figures of the contemporary Slovak cultural scene. His unconventional artistic (and literary) work has won praise at home and abroad.
Innovation is the hallmark of Macho’s work: innovation in working with and painting on glass. Macho’s talent spans two fields – glass and painting. Glass is his canvas; he is a painter who uses the transparency, translucency, fragility and exclusivity of glass, which as opposed to a classical canvas, adds physical (spatial) as well as semantic dimensions to his work.
His original expression is supported by experimentation, playfulness and curiosity and features the use of digitally transferred photographs, imprints, drawings, windows, various plains of painting and drawings on layered glass panels. In recent years, he has painted on metal constructions incorporated in space, thus creating a specific kind of painting as object – sculpture. Thanks to his extensive studies at glass schools in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, he is able to “mold glass” into his own image and to employ the entire range of glass making technology. He began shaping his concept of work and his path to art as a young artist and has never essentially changed these opinions.
Macho’s expression, which is based on European cultural values and scholarship, is highly intellectual. Instead of entertaining us with stories and commentaries on current events, he depicts general principles of existence, thinking and the universe. His poetic and abstracting paintings inspired by his childhood, the countryside, architecture, the human figure and rituals, have a strong emotional potential and invoke associations with meditation and philosophical thinking.
He studied at the Secondary Industrial Glass School in Nový Bor, Czechoslovakia from 1980 to 1983, and the Secondary School of Glassmaking in Kamenický Šenov, Czechoslovakia from 1983 to 1986, before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU), in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1995. He also studied at the École de Beaux-Arts, Saint-Étienne, France in 1993, and at the Cité International des Arts, Paris, France in 1997. From 1994 to 1998 he taught at the Secondary Glass School (Stredná odborná škola sklárska) in Lednické Rovne, Slovakia. Since 2011 he has been working as Senior Assistant Professor in the Studio of Glass at the Department of Applied Arts at VŠVU (AFAD) in Bratislava.
Palo Macho has published two collections of poetry. Strelné modlitby (Firing Prayers), 1995 and Mesiac na červeno (The Moon in Red), 2006. Films: Glass paintings-Palo Macho, documentary film by Meir Lubor Dohnal, Artileria, 2008. His monograph entitled Palo Macho was written by Katarína Bajcurová and Sylva Petrová and published in 2015.
