MILAN DOBEŠ

Milan Dobeš (Přerov, 1929) is a part of a generation of Neo-Avant-Garde artists of the 1960s in Slovakia who found their inspiration in the Avant-Garde Constructivist tendencies oriented towards light and movement exploration.

From 1951 to 1956, he attended the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava under prof. Ladislav Čemický, Bedrich Hoffstädter, and studied at the Department of Landscape Painting under prof. Dezider Milly.

Milan Dobeš is a pioneer of Constructivist and Kinetic art in Slovakia, one of the most notable op-art artists globally. In 1950, he left traditional media and started using various unconventional synthetic materials. In 1960, he began creating visual-kinetic and lumino-kinetic objects. His artistic manifesto is called Dynamic Constructivism. Light and movement are a constituent of his work. His main aim was to achieve the interactive relationship between the artwork and the observer. His works range from collages, objects, reliefs, serigraphy, architectural reliefs and paintings.

As part of the Prvý otvorený ateliér, organised in Rudolf Sikora’s house on 19 November 1970 in Bratislava, he created a lumino-kinetic object Movement of Light.

Milan Dobeš was a member of the Geometria group (Prague). In 1991, he joined the Q group in Brno. In 2001 the Milan Dobeš Museum was founded in Bratislava.