6 September 2003 – 28 November 2003
“First Emperor” was a joint exhibition of the American photographer Sidney J. Gluck and the Slovak painter Peter Pollág. Both artists were inspired by the terracotta army guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China. Gluck took photographs of the unique figures on the archaeological site near Xi’an. However, his intentions reached beyond the presentation of documentary photography. He converted the photographs to digital form. To produce printed images he composed the photographs, changed their colours and enhanced them with textures. Sometimes he combined several photographs into one to create a more expressive composition with thirty to forty soldiers in the uncovered trenches of the site. Thus Gluck created a series of canvases for the exhibition in Bratislava. The original photographs provided inspiration for new artworks. It is fascinating that in this artistic process “the highest level of technology in antiquity was combined with the most advanced technology of our times”.
Curator: Edwin Meulensteen