No matter how far he travels or where his work is shown, Slovak artist Andrej Dúbravský always stays connected to his roots — nature and countryside life. With the curiosity of a scientist, he dives into the exploration of living things like bees, caterpillars, ladybugs, pets, and nude men. Dúbravský’s works depict the diversity of the biological and the human forms. His depictions of chubby men have shocked and outraged politicians. So what? The artist is determined to challenge perceptions of the human body—but also just to have fun.

It’s so pretty and peaceful at your village house and studio in Rastislavice. You also spend time in New York, for example. How do you balance your time and life between the Slovak countryside and the hustle of the big cities throughout the year?
It depends on the season. Summer is better in the countryside, but there’s not much interesting happening in winter. So, in the fall, I always go to the city—like New York—because I need some cultural and intellectual stimulus, and I also have work to do there.

Originally, you wanted to become a scientist. When did you find the artist's path more interesting? 
When I was a child, I always had some kind of obsession. When I was seven or eight, I only drew the Prodigy (the English electronic music band). But mostly, I was always drawn to animals. I attended after-school drawing classes for nine years. It was fun, but nothing more than a hobby. My teacher was very supportive and once asked me, “Maybe you want to study art in high school?” I didn't really think about having an art career because we don't have any professional artists in the family. And my parents (like many others of the same generation in Slovakia) always thought that you need to have some kind of connections, or your parents had to be artists—so only these kids could study art.

So you proved them wrong? 
Yes, I got into the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava and studied stone sculpting. Even though I went through my coming out process only later in high school, I’ve been really attracted to Michelangelo, Renaissance art, and sculpture since I was 14. Studying stone sculpting was a no-brainer for me, but the reality was totally different from what I expected. It turned out to be really heavy, tough work—using big tools and working with these ambiguous stones—and I was maybe 58 kilos. I’d go home crying at night. I ended up liking stone sculpting in school. Funny thing is, because we couldn’t take the stones home to do homework like students in other faculties, I had a lot of free time. I spent that time painting and reading books about painting because, from my second year, I decided I wanted to study painting at university later, which I eventually did.

If you had to introduce yourself to a stranger, what would you say you do?
I guess I am just a painter. When I lived in Berlin and went to a gay sauna, people would ask me what I do, and I’d always tell them I’m a farmer and that I came to Berlin for a permaculture congress.

Why?
Because there are so many horrible clichés about painters. It was also quite hard for some strangers I met to believe that someone could be a professional artist and do it for a living.

But here we are, you are an artist. Can you tell us what interests you?
I love to paint living things, which are around me and which fascinate me. Over the last 2-3 years, I focused a lot on painting bees, making big paintings three meters wide or small ones. I was kind of doing research on this subject, not only scientifically but also painterly. I also painted human bodies a lot, always focusing on living things. Humans are as fascinating to me as animals. At the same time, I was experimenting with different formal approaches, training myself in a super liquidy, watercolour-like technique for many years. I feel like I’ve reached a point where I’m very well-trained, my paintings are selling, and things are going great. But now I want to try something a little different, so I’m testing new ideas—like using thicker paint or adding more layers.

Would you agree that, to some extent, your desire to be a scientist is reflected in your art—you study and depict nature and life in the countryside so meticulously?
I feel like I'm just an amateur scientist, and I'm sponsoring my big passion with my art. Since I'm earning money from painting, I have the chance to have a big garden.

So, it's not a lie when you tell strangers you're a gardener.
I'm more into wilderness than gardening. I grow some vegetables, but it's really not my passion. The area I live and work in is sort of an agricultural desert — just the fields, where there's no real wilderness here unless you make it yourself. That’s why I’ve planted lots of trees and perennials, trying to create an environment for insects, frogs, snakes, and hedgehogs. I enjoy observing solitary bees and checking out all the parasites that lay eggs in their larvae. It's hard to say whether my bigger passion is working in the studio or observing nature. But I know I can't paint something that doesn’t occupy my mind. I think it's all connected, and I’m really happy that people are vibing with my work and interested in it. 

For some exhibitions, in addition to ink and acrylic, you used insecticide and other garden chemicals to create your drawings, as well as cigarette butts, beer caps, various seeds, and soil. How did you come up with such ideas?
When I first came to the village, I was shocked by the amount of chemicals people used in their gardens. I inherited all the poisons when I bought the house. I also noticed that my neighbours drank and smoked a lot. There’s this cliché or romanticized idea about countryside folks living healthy lives, but that’s not really how it always is. So, I made a big series called “Chem Farmers” in 2016, where I used elements like smoked meat, cigarettes, beer caps, and all the things that were present around me. I also included the iron chemical, which isn’t actually harmful, but it has a nice orange colour. I created drawings with all these elements, and it was super playful and really fun. Many of them were actually sold, and now I’m a bit nervous that someone might call me about them – I still have some of these works and I’ve been observing whether they’re starting to rot or if anything else is happening to them.

No collectors are disappointed yet, then, but two years ago, the Slovak Minister of Culture was outraged by one of your works depicting two men kissing. What exactly happened?
It was an exhibition at the Slovak Public Radio in Bratislava. Turns out, Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová was horrified by my painting, where a skinny guy is kissing a chubby guy. After that, I saw a lot of comments online, and people were saying things like, “Fat guy, that's disgusting,” or “This art is horrible.” People weren’t really upset because two men were kissing, but mainly because one of them was fat. This happened two years ago, but the situation is still going on and seems to be getting downhill in Slovakia—the culture scene seems organized by the state. The Slovak National Gallery is totally screwed up right now, along with many other institutions. It was extremely distracting for me, because people were interested in me, my personality and my art. Journalists were always asking me the same questions. I always tried to bring the attention back to paintings, back to art. 

 This painting somehow became a symbol of the protest against censorship in Bratislava. Do you think such a big conversation changed something? 
I didn't want to give off those controversial artist kind of vibes because that would feel really cheap. I just wanted to paint the human body and work with this particular type of body even more. I spent a lot of time researching how to paint it. I didn't realize it's important for the public to talk about how I love to fuck fat guys, but apparently it is. After that, I found a platform to talk about body shaming and similar issues. 

It's interesting that it's such a taboo for many people. Hasn't the history of world art depicted all sorts of different bodies and shapes?
In painting, you don't often see this kind of body, because there's not a good representation of plus-size people in pop culture. At the same time, yes, we have art history with Peter Paul Rubens and Lucian Freud. But since that story happened, there's been a lot of explanation and talking about it. I think now it’s kind of worked out. I enjoy painting those chubby guys—just the skin, using a big brush, and creating the volumes and the folds of this big body. It’s a living thing, just like all of us, full of peace and everything.

Previously, your works often featured naked men with rabbit ears. Do these attributes have anything to do with the perception of the male body as well?
It was during my first year at the Academy of Fine Arts when I started painting young boys as rabbits. In Slovakia, when you were a young boy or girl, people would find you cute and often call you “Zajačik” (which means “rabbit”). It's almost a cliché, and I kind of appropriated that idea; I was one of them, or I played that role. So it was partly a role-play, but I wanted to work with it rationally in my work. I wouldn't say there was any hardcore conceptual approach, but some people could still understand it. At some point, the rabbit ears turned into horns.

What are these horns then about? 
I want to paint the essence of someone—either all the boys, all the men, or the human body itself. If I give them a horn, they become mythical creatures from art history, like Bacchus and Fauns. People immediately recognize that it's not a specific friend of mine or a lover, even if it could be. But then it broadens the concept. Everyone knows my work is deeply personal, but not in a descriptive way; it has metaphorical associations. I'm not interested in painting my vacation at the particular gay beach under the full moon. I really respect artists who do that kind of work or focus on specific people or moments. There are just many different ways and approaches to depicting the human body.

In some of your exhibitions, like “Mosaic Of Dopamine Deficiency Of A Tadpole” in 2023 at Gaa Gallery New York, you completely take over the space, covering even the walls with works, often layering them on top of each other. Does this make the audience’s experience more immersive?
It's overwhelming, and it kind of creates a story. It gives off that basilica atmosphere when you see all the frescoes, the framed paintings, and the altar. To create such an experience, I use some of my old, unstretched paintings—maybe from 2010—that have now become a traveling archive. I just install them directly on the wall with nails, kind of messing them up because these canvases can’t be used anymore as proper paintings. It's confusing for many people, but I see it as an archive of ugly paintings—works I’m not 100 percent satisfied with. I have three big suitcases of these canvases. They’ve been in the US, Germany, Korea, and Slovakia.

For your latest exhibition “Local Philosopher Between Two Summer Storms” at FIM, the contemporary art gallery in Seoul, how was it received? 
This time, I wanted to create a perfectly clean exhibition with just white walls and the perfect paintings. But the curators had seen the exhibition in New York and really wanted to have a big installation with the canvases all over the walls. It’s not that I wanted to repeat something I’ve done a few times already, but they wanted that kind of experience. I felt, on some level, that it was a little bit distracting. The whole installation probably drew attention away from the individual paintings, but for the sake of the overall show, I was okay with that. Many people came, took photos, and bought my work. I just wanted to give the Korean audience an experience—something they hadn’t seen before.

At the beginning of your career, you organized exhibitions in places such as butcher's shops and abandoned construction sites, and now you have the basilica-like exhibitions. At the same time, you mentioned that such settings can be too distracting. I am trying to understand what you prefer?
Of course, the perception of those exhibitions is totally different than on a white wall in a gallery. Spaces like that draw too much attention, but I'm already reckoning with that. I kind of sacrifice the painting for the experience. In the end, I do the exhibitions for the audience. I remember I had an exhibition at the Bratislava City Museum a long time ago, and they gave me a nice big space with white walls. I did some installations there, and then I realized the museum had some extra space under the roof that they wouldn’t use for exhibitions. It looked so good that I asked them if I could have that space as well, so I hung some smoked sausages, and the fat from them would drip onto the drawings on the floor.

Quite a choice. 
After a few years, I still heard people remembering the show with the sausages and the grease on the drawings, and how great it was. But nobody remembered what was downstairs. Still, it excites me—how to create an experience for the audience and make them remember it, to feel something beyond just seeing and experiencing the paintings. And I have to admit, I also just want to have fun because I love having fun.

How is the lead-up to the exhibitions?
I'm dead serious in the studio. When I create a painting, I want to make the best painting ever. I want everything to be balanced, with perfect composition and layers, so that every painter in the world can say, “Yes, Andrej created a good painting and it worked well.” Once the painting is finished, I just want to enjoy creating the installation and have fun with it. It's a different approach for me. Whenever I hear stories about artists coming just to the opening, with their paintings already installed on the walls, I get shocked because I find the installation process a lot of fun. I love making a cardboard model of the installation, blending everything together, and just playing with it. 

What does your day at the studio look like?
I usually work two shifts per day. First, I have a really big breakfast with coffee. Don’t invite me for morning croissants; it’s at least four eggs because I need protein and vegetables. Then I head to the studio for 2-3 hours. Usually, it’s more about preparing the canvas and doing more of the physical stuff. During the day, I spend a lot of time in the garden, then reply to emails. I try to have sex almost every day. But in the evening, from six onwards, I just go to the studio, no matter what, and work until 10 or 11. That’s when I focus properly on a painting. Even my mom knows that she can’t call me then. This time is extremely precious for me, but it’s also kind of isolating because all my friends are always up for hanging out then. 

Could you tell us about any upcoming exhibitions?
I have a show at Kunstpalais Erlangen in Germany this November, which will mainly focus on nature and environmental themes, including bees. Additionally, we want to produce a book featuring my work. Another exhibition will be in New York in September at the Gaa Gallery. It will be my second solo show with this gallery; last time, I did a large installation, so this time I want to create something entirely different—more figurative, perhaps with smaller formats and thicker pieces. I’m very excited to experiment with new ideas, both formally and thematically. Of course, there’s a risk that some experiments might not work, which can be stressful. But I’m trying not to hold back from exploring, researching, and testing new things just because of upcoming shows. I feel like I’m having more fundamental thoughts about my work and my life. I prefer to think in short-term terms but with a long-term perspective. To me, the painting process is a lifelong project.

Text: Anton Isiukov
Photo: Branislav Simoncik