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The sculptor Vojtech Löffler was active on the Košice art scene since the mid-1930s. He was one of the first and few East Slovak sculptors of his time. It was only later, in the 1950s, that generationally younger sculptors entered the East-Slovak art environment, who fundamentally expanded the Košice and East-Slovak sculpture community and brought current artistic programmes and a new sculptural language. Vojtech Löffler remained a solitary artist in the developing sculptural milieu, solitary in his artistic direction with his sculpture.
In public, the artist was known as the author of mainly lyrical chamber sculptures. Part of the public was also familiar with his monumental and memorial sculpture, which he continuously and quite intensively entered the public space of Košice and Eastern Slovakia from the mid-1940s onwards. In the last two decades, the artist's name has also been known through the Museum of Vojtech Löffler in Košice, where the public is presented with a permanent exhibition of the artist's work and solo exhibitions, mainly presenting newer concepts of contemporary visual art and the work of representatives of the younger artistic generation.
The sculptor Vojtech Löffler worked as if in a kind of programmatic and generational intermediate state. He was not a member of a broader group current. His work, determined by the objective circumstances and limits of its creation, in a fundamental sense represents a distinctly individual artistic model, subtly and delicately emerging and evolving in the intent of the author's gradual search and human and artistic maturation. In retrospect, however, we cannot fail to perceive deeper sources anchored in the artist's work and clearly referring to principles that, bypassing syncretic local modernist concepts, certainly situate the fundamental moments of the artist's oeuvre in proximity to the deeper and more fundamental ideas of classical European modernism.
Vojtech Löffler's sculptural work in relation to parallel contemporary artistic conceptions did not represent an unambiguous and strict orientation towards progressivist currents. The artist's line, also as a result of the specifics of the development of his artistic programme and his relatively late decision to devote his energies exclusively to fine art (in this situation, we should not forget the war years, which marked Löffler's artistic development in a significantly negative way), represented a distinctly solitary artistic form on the Košice and Eastern Slovak art scene.
In Löffler's case, we can feel more strongly the problem of the composition of sculptural masses and volumes, their certain autonomization and the escalating process of formalizing the artistic language, as a result of which the sculptor often preferred the structural problems of the artistic form, the importance of stylization, the rhythmic warehouse of liberating volumes, the suppression of detail in favour of pure form flowing in beautiful curves, prevailing over a strict and anatomically consistent perception of the body modelling itself and its anatomical laws. Finally, this concept of depriving the anatomical links in the representation of the human body of their essential character, minimizing physiognomy or abandoning earlier poeticizing features or more expressive emotional expression, was complemented by an escalating and intensely perceived need for shape stylization, the denial of portraiture and, in a later period, the suppression of proportional relationships in sculpture and a retreat from the principles of balanced anatomical bodily form. The sculptor complemented the above reductive artistic process by combining the formulated artistic language with the features of the primitivizing artistic form. This reductive process of depriving the sculpture of its classical figurative features was fulfilled in the last decade of the sculptor's oeuvre. With numerous sets of carved wooden sculptures, but also metal cast works, created in a distinct vertical, he no longer seemed to directly deny the need to respect the proportions and sculptural expression, limiting the anatomy of the human figure.
The consistent perception of the transformation of the sculptural form, the preference for the form of sculptures in the form of some kind of idols or simplified vertical laurels, suggests an almost uncanny return of the artist to the obscured levels of primitive and archaic creativity. This apparent atavism of Löffler's perhaps only outwardly surprisingly communicates with the deeper and primary sources of European artistic modernism. In the consequences of this persistent tendency, we can also see the artist's continuing efforts to adopt a pure, geometrically abstracted form. Perhaps these aspects also suggest why, in our perception, the sculptor Votetch Löffler may be both a known and unknown artist in several respects.
Vojtech Löffler was not one of the authors with a radically and thesis-formulated artistic programme. The whirling counter-movements of the artist's form development point to the artist's non-dogmatic relaxation without any predictable linearity. Despite the sculptor's partly realistic work, even his monumental memorial work, he remains primarily remembered as an intimate sculptor with an attractive genre model for his sculpture. Narrative-descriptive and geometrized form continuously permeated his entire oeuvre. This certain restlessness and tension-generating state legitimized both lines in the artist's oeuvre, which emerged from the fundamental developmental motivations of his work. In Löffler's sculptural conception there is a certain tension or overlap between its different polarities. The pure sculptural form, with its absence of detail, contrasts with the approach of the carver, interested primarily in describing the detail of the carving. A certain mannerism in the accentuated minutiae of the carving, the emphasis on technical attributes and the bravura achieved, the pursuit of a kind of carving minutiae or an extreme relationship to detail clearly deviate from contemporary sculptural trends. The artist's persistent search for beauty and refinement in the structure of wood and stone, his deep interest in the perfection of workmanship and material exclusivity represent the attributes of classical sculptural culture and, to some extent, the antithesis of contemporary artistic conceptions.
The work of Vojtech Löffler in its environment represents one of the possibilities of finding and defining a contemporary sculptural form, connected with classical artistic thinking and sculptural tradition. The artist's work can be regarded as distinctly personal and only gradually integratable with the defining sculptural concepts of the time. Vojtech Löffler worked with a classical conviction in his belief in the value of craftsmanship, his respect for the material and his perception of its nobility. This aspect of his artistic character contrasts with the contemporary preference for a more profane approach and material pauperization. In the given context, Löffler's efforts can be seen as a solitary and perhaps the last relevant local sculptural programme, purposefully dealing with values that were already fundamentally rejected by contemporary sculpture of the time.
Löffler's sculptural language was essentially based on realistic sculptural positions. In its early days, the artist's poetics applied, alongside his portrait interest, a socially attuned genre vision of the subject, in which the sculptor exercised his ability to capture emotions and also a certain narrative quality of the motif. The early works exhibited a variable degree of realistic vision, which at this early stage already allowed for a transition to the application of a surprisingly pure abstract language. Already at that early moment, we can detect this typical for Löffler and permanent conflict or contradiction in the perception of the form of the work being created. By being able to see both the pure and softly modeled sculptural form and the sensibility of realistic form, Löffler indicates his future complicated relationship to his later modern abstracted sculptural form and the part of his work emphasizing detail and narrative.
There are several contexts pointing to a possible closer attachment of the artist's work to the value foundations of twentieth-century artistic modernism. The purity of stylized form and precisely abstracted sculptural form have been mentioned repeatedly. In connection with the artist's work, we can describe one aspect of early modernism that represents its programmatic orientation towards purifying artistic sources that reach beyond the context of European culture, namely the art of primitive cultures. The stark primitivizing feature of Löffler's sculpture was partly overlaid by the admired aesthetic ideal of the nobility and beauty of perfect classical antique sculpture. The reduced primitivizing forms of the figure, with their limitedly outlined faces and severely limited features of physicality, proportion and anatomical looseness, offer us only a seemingly surprising reflection on Löffler's relationship to modern sculpture and the value sources of his sculptural work.
The expressively outlined features of female faces with broad cheekbones represent the artist's discourse on the formal, emotional and psychological sources that became an immanent part of European artistic modernism and certainly of Vojtech Löffler's artistic concept. Similar connections to radicalized expressive art forms help to more fully understand his later work in particular, characterized by the primitivizing features of faces and their minimalist physiognomy without overt identifications with culturally close local ethnographic or folkloric traditions. With an awareness of similar aspects, in some situations the artist's simplistically received work may appear more structured, more intrinsically complicated and, above all, closer to the values of modern art.
In Löffler's work and approach to art we can find several atavisms. Perhaps the primitivising form of his works, representing the antithesis of formally perfect stone, metal or wooden sculptures, hints at a deeper inner motivation. Perhaps the aforementioned action carries the remnants of the once intense efforts he made in discovering the laws of the material, the search for the artisanal form, and the knowledge of the process of creation itself. As a seeker of his artistic truth, Vojtech Löffler perceived material beauty as part of it. In certain situations, he may have sacrificed the artistic aspect to capture it. The artist's quest and a kind of compulsive need to create brought his sculptural work to borderline positions in relation to the perception of the values of conventionally understood art.