Colour spills beyond the image, warming the room, pressing against its edges. Large bees dominate the walls. Naked bodies appear at ease and exposed at the same time. In Protest of Peculiars at Kunstpalais Erlangen, the paintings do not wait to be interpreted — they insist on presence. The work of Andrej Dúbravský brings together insects, bodies, flowers and damaged environments with a disarming directness. Scale shifts without warning. Intimacy appears without reassurance. What unfolds is neither pastoral nor provocative, but strangely seductive: a space where minor lives gain weight and where looking slows down almost against one’s will. Placed against the political turmoil surrounding queer visibility in Slovakia, the paintings produce a striking contrast. Their gentleness is not detached from reality, but drawn from it. Innocence here is not a theme, but an effect: generated through enlarged scale, through closeness that invites attention rather than reaction, through colour that softens impact without neutralising consequence. The works remain embedded in their moment, while allowing a different register of experience to emerge.

In conversation, Dúbravský speaks about painting as pleasure and persistence — about scale as something felt in the body, colour as long-term obsession, and the effort of keeping the work open when attention and expectation start to close in.

Your exhibition is titled Protest of Peculiars. What does “peculiarity” mean to you personally, and what drew you to this title?

Being gay or queer in Slovakia right now is considered pretty peculiar by many, I guess—just like being a caterpillar, a tadpole, or some kind of insect is peculiar to most people. About a year ago I opened an exhibition titled Protest of a Dead Bee. This new show is a continuation of that concept, but it goes a bit further. I wanted to make the connection obvious. Peculiar creatures—even if they live under a rock or stay hidden—still have a kind of protest potential.

You live and work on a rural farm in Slovakia. How does this environment shape your process, rhythm, or the emotional temperature of your work?

I change where I live and work quite often. These days I spend a maximum of five months a year on the farm; otherwise I’d go psychotic from loneliness and the lack of living culture. I can’t feed myself with art and culture from books and the internet all year long. The constant moving of my studio and myself shapes my work and affects the painting process for sure.
I hate having a big exhibition deadline in early autumn, because the summers there are exhausting—I just want to swim in the lake, grill meat for lovers and friends, and water the garden every morning. In summer I love painting small, non-ambitious experimental pieces after a late breakfast, drinking coffee for two hours, and watching what’s flying around the perennials I planted next to my table. From my garden chair I can observe the pollinators all day.
But sometimes I have to produce large new works for an autumn show, and that’s hell. Still, I paint in the garden every day, exhibition or not—it just becomes a different type of work.

Some of your works have triggered strong reactions in Slovakia, especially those containing queer intimacy. How do you navigate the space between artistic freedom and the public climate around you?

It was an extremely exhausting period. On one hand, the Minister of Culture made me suddenly very famous in Slovakia (thanks), and for many people visiting my exhibition—or even owning one of my paintings—became an act of resistance against the current government. On the other hand, I was in a peculiar position where media, podcasts, and discussions kept asking for interviews and expected cool, deep answers from me, and probably expected me to talk endlessly about how incompetent the politicians are (which they truly are).
But all of this distracted me terribly from studio work. Sometimes it felt like we were explaining to people how these politicians are destroying our institutions; other times it felt like entertainment for the audience, which got on my nerves. But if the situation is so shitty and hopeless, people tend to turn it into entertainment because there’s not much else to do.

Several paintings in the exhibition depict bees at an unusually large scale, while animals, queer bodies and charged natural environments appear throughout the work. What draws you to these constellations?

It just feels really good to paint a bee two meters big—and it looks cool hanging on the wall.
But beyond that, the narratives are extremely simple. We all have bodies, we’re all part of living nature, totally affected by our environment—and we all die sooner or later.

Your palette ranges from tender pastels to saturated, electric tones. How do colour and atmosphere guide you when developing a scene?

Thank you for asking about colour. I’m really trying to become an advanced colourist. I constantly test colour combinations, layer diluted paint, and create gradients. It’s been years of research. I’m very serious about it, and I hope the audience can see and enjoy it.

Your works often balance fluid washes with precise marks. How do materiality, accident, and control interact in your practice?

I really hope my paintings look effortless—but that takes days, months, or even years of training. Behind almost every finished work are a few failed attempts. The worst is when I prepare a perfect sunset-like gradient, and the next day I paint the bee on it and it looks like a sausage or has a dumb facial expression. Daaaaamn… noooo.
When that happens, I often flip the canvas and work on the other side. And if that fails too, I give the canvas to painter friends so they can gesso it and use it. Even though I use lots of canvas in the process, nothing goes to the trash bin.

Your paintings engage closely with bodies—their shapes, gestures, and emotional states. What draws you to particular body languages or physicalities?

I’ve loved painting bodies since I was a little kid—I never drew cars or houses. I’m not interested in the “perfect” bodies we see on Instagram or in pop culture; I don’t paint muscle guys. I’m personally attracted to fat men, but that’s just one reason I like painting them. Being fat means being a minority within a minority, and the larger body gives me many painterly possibilities. And for people like our Minister of Culture, being fat and queer is still considered immoral and something children shouldn’t see.
Recently, I’ve been painting fat men on swings, inspired by the Rococo painter Honoré Fragonard—again, with many layers and connotations. Some of the very skinny male figures could be me, especially after losing ten kilos while preparing the show. A few works simply show me checking my itchy skin in the mirror, eyes wide open, or that moment when you’re so tired you almost fall asleep standing up on the way from the bathroom to bed.
These skinny bodies also work better when I paint polluted lakes with factories in the background. You can’t really thrive or grow big muscles in a dystopian, contaminated environment.

The conversation makes one thing clear: nothing in Dúbravský’s work is meant to be overlooked. A bee, a stone, a body — each appears with full presence. When he speaks about painting a bee two metres tall because it feels right, or about bodies simply existing within their environments, the statements are direct, unsoftened. Nothing is reduced, nothing is made secondary.

That clarity produces a particular kind of innocence — not as naivety, but as insistence. In a context where bodies and forms of life are constantly interpreted, politicised or corrected, the work refuses to assign hierarchy. Bodies, insects and landscapes are placed on the same level, each carrying weight, each demanding attention. Innocence emerges here not from distance to reality, but from proximity to it. What remains is not an argument, but a shift in how reality is encountered. The paintings do not ask what things stand for. They insist that they are there.

Protest of Peculiars runs at Kunstpalais Erlangen through February 22, 2026.