Samuel Kollárik (* 1992) was born in Bojnice, Slovakia. He graduated in 2021 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the Malba IV studio under the guidance of Marko Meduna and Petr Dub.

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Thematically, my work evolved from the personal experience of a heterosexual coming from a highly heteronormative culture. I portray a certain kind of archetype of male masculinity, in which certain post-oidpal traits are subconsciously manifested, combined with the experience of smalltown SHARP skins culture. The specific masculinity of the "old school" type, which has its basis in the cult of Rambos, Rockys and Terminators in the local small-town context, is deformed and the macho cult becomes a source of amusingly paradoxical characteristics and situations. This is the edge on which I try to balance my means of expression and seek therapeutic glimmers of masculinity as a quality to be proud of. An essential element is a certain kind of overexposed playfulness, often brought to the edge of comedy, caricature or illustrativeness, with which I try to convey a distance from the topic itself and thus the crisis of male roles. Symbols refer to the history of art but also to the common experience of urban people, creating an atypical cocktail of references in order to expand the field of reading the image, not only in a visual sense but also in a literary sense