source: matejkrencz

Matej Krén’s work is remarkable for its exceptional scope. In recent years his distinctive approach to sculpture, object, installation, drawing, print, painting, action art, film, music, sound and word has attracted attention at many prestigious international art shows.
His work not only touches on very contemporary problems, such as erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and the present, but also on classic themes in art – the relation between inner and outer, the part and the whole. Typical of his work is a searching for a complexity of content expressed in a monumental and comprehensible language.

Matej Krén was born in 1958 in Trenčín. After graduating from the Applied Arts Secondary School in Bratislava he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava from 1977-81, and from 1981-1985 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. As a student in Prague he successfully entered the International Student Exhibition in Kobe, Japan, where his work received the Honor Award (1985). Before 1989 he participated in many unofficial exhibitions, such as Artprospekt, Posun artefaktu, Terén, etc. An exhibition by a group of Bratislava-based artists entitled Basement (1989) received broader attention from the public. From 1986 to 1988 he worked in the Bratři v triku film studio at Barrandov, making the animated film That’s a Movie, which after 1989 was screened at a number of international film festivals in Paris, Berlin, Trenčianske Teplice and in Huesca in Spain, where it won the main prize, the Danzante de Oro (1991).

Following the events of November 1989 he helped to transform the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, followed by a brief period of teaching there.

Since the beginning of the 1990s he has had exhibitions in major cities in Europe and overseas (Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, Seoul, Vienna, etc.). In 1992 and 1993 he accepted an invitation to the international Creativity Studio in the Manufacture Nationale de Sévres in Paris, where he worked on projects using porcelain processed in a novel way. He has also received several international awards. For example in 1994 at the Bienal de Sao Paolo he won both main prizes, the Critics’ Prize and the Viewers’ Prize; in 1995 his work won the main prize in the international art competition Promotion of the Arts, organised by UNESCO in Paris. In the same year the American Pollock-Krasner Foundation gave him a grant, and he received an award from the Slovak Minister of Culture for his successful representation of Slovak art abroad.

In 1998 he installed a “tower of books” entitled Idiom in the entrance hall of the Prague Municipal Library. His rotunda made of books, Gravity Mixer, became a key part of the Czech pavilion at EXPO 2000 in Hanover. In 2004 he was chosen to represent Slovak art as part of the travelling exhibition project The New Ten, conceived as a symbolic joining with the European Union in the field of contemporary art. The exhibition commences in Duisburg in Germany and will travel to several major European metropolises.

His work is also featured in many art collections at home and abroad.

The artist currently lives and works in Prague.
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source: inhabitat

The Prague Municipal Library is now home to a spiraling tower of hundreds of carefully stacked books assembled by Slovakian born artist Matej Kren. Dubbed Idiom, the staggering installation reaches up to the ceiling, and Kren installed a mirror inside the funnel to create the illusion of a magical, unending spire of books.

Matej Kren’s ‘Idiom’ book tower originally appeared in Sao Paulo’s International Biennial in 1995. It consists of hundreds and hundreds of books stacked in a cylindrical pattern with the overlapping style of a Jenga game. A narrow tear-shaped opening creates a ten-foot hole in the side of the tower. The colorful spines of the various books create a rainbow pattern on the outside, while on the inside the well-worn, yellow-tinged pages of the books cast a warm glow.

Patrons of the Prague Municipal Library can peer their heads and shoulders into the tower’s interior. A mirror has been placed on the tower’s floor, replicating the experience of looking down into the waters of a wishing well. Another mirror caps the ceiling, creating an infinity effect. The stacks of books seem to climb and descend endlessly in both directions around the reflection of the visitor themselves.

Matej Kren often uses books to connect viewers with the feeling of infinity, exploring their structural use as well their application as tools of knowledge. Upon the close of many of his installations, the books used in the sculptural cells and structures are returned to their original purpose – the function of being read. The books work together to create these massive structures, and individually to spread the knowledge within their pages.