Roman Ondak

Biography

In 2012 the work “do not walk outside this area” by Roman Ondak was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, when Deutsche Bank chose him as its Artist of the Year. The title sounds like an ordinary warning in a museum gallery, and that is perhaps a good starting point for talking about him.

He was born on 5 August 1966 in Žilina, then in Czechoslovakia, now in Slovakia. From 1988 to 1994 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He also studied in Italy, the United States and Switzerland; about the dates and schools I cannot say anything definite. He established himself in the art world after the changes in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He lives and works in Bratislava.

Ondak works with drawing, spatial installation, performance and situations in which the line between visitor and artwork is blurred. His best-known piece is “Measuring the Universe” (2007): visitors to the gallery were asked to mark their height and the date on a wall, and gradually the wall filled with lines and names. The work has been shown many times: in 2008 at the DAAD Galerie in Berlin, in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 2010–2011 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 2011 at Tate St Ives, and in 2022 at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

Among his other works are “Good Feelings in Good Times” (2003), “More Silent Than Ever” (2006), “Time Capsule” (2011), “Loop” (2009), “Signature” (2014) and “Perfect Society” (2019). In 2006, at the exhibition More Silent Than Ever at the gb agency gallery in Paris, “The Stray Man” (French title “L’Homme égaré”) was shown for the first time: in one version it is a man in ordinary clothes standing quietly in the exhibition space, in the other a twenty-one-minute video filmed in Graz. The man keeps looking in at the windows of a gallery beside a tram stop and never goes inside, while passers-by do not notice.

He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1999, 2003, 2009 and 2011. In 2006 he was shown at Tate Modern in London, in 2007 at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, in 2011 at the Kunsthaus Zürich (“Enter the Orbit”) and at Modern Art Oxford, where “Time Capsule” was presented. In 2012 came his exhibitions at K21 in Düsseldorf (“Within Reach of Hand and Eye”) and at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and he was invited to documenta 13 in Kassel. Later came the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2013), Kaldor Art Projects in Sydney (2014), the Times Museum in Guangzhou (2015), the South London Gallery (2016), the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (2017) and Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). In 2025 Kunsthalle Praha showed his exhibition “The Day After Yesterday”. In 2009 he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize. In 2018 he was awarded the Lovis Corinth Prize, and the exhibition “Based on True Events” opened at the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg.

His works are in the collections of Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MUMOK in Vienna, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, and the Art Collection Telekom and the Boros Collection in Berlin.