Kalný Igor (1957 - 1987)

Igor Kalný was born on 16 August 1957 in Trenčín and died early at the age of 30 on 26 November 1987 in Bratislava. His parents were Slavo Kalný, a journalist, and Valéria Kalna, a teacher. In 1972-1976 he studied at the Secondary Industrial School of Graphics in Bratislava. For ideological reasons he was not allowed to continue his studies of visual art at the Faculty of Pedagogy of Trnava University. Towards the end of the 1970s he started intensively communicating with authors of analytical tendencies (later Group A-R), with writers, and organizers of the unofficial cultural stage. From 1979 to 1986 he participated in the Bratislava Championship of Artifact Shift that was initiated by Dezider Tóth. He focused on drawing, painting, performance, poetry and author books. He and Pepo Schottl started the CUCU music body, he illustrated a samizdat edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1984), collaborated on publishing the samizdat magazines Kontakt (from 1980) and Fragment (from 1986).

The first unofficial exhibition of Kalny’s works took place in 1979 in the Bratislava cabinet of the House of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship where he was working, and later in the Young Artists Gallery in Brno (1983), in the Bratislava City Gallery where he was also employed in 1981-1987 (1988, 2005), in the Považska Art Gallery (PGU) in Žilina (1995), in Gallery Z (2008), the Slovak Institute in Moscow (2009), in the Roman Fecik Gallery (2014) and others. His works were included in numerous group exhibitions such as Čertovo kolo (Devil’s Ring), Bratislava (1988), To Igor Kalny, the Institute of Applied Cybernetics, Bratislava (1988), Kunst Europa, Lingen (1991), Art of the 20^th Century, Slovak National Gallery, SNG, (2000), The Art of Action, SNG (2001), Slovak Visual Art 1970-1985, SNG (2002), Slovak Graphics of the 20^th Century, Bratislava City Gallery, GMB, (2007) and others. 

Since 2006 the Igor Kalny Award has been periodically granted at the Saloon of the Young Artists in Zlín. His works are in collections of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), Bratislava City Gallery (GMB), Central Slovakia Gallery (SSG) in Banska Bystrica, PGU in Žilina, in MU Olomouc, NG in Prague as well as in private collections. In 2008 a monograph was published about the artist (Jiří Valoch, Daniela Čarná).