Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava

The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (AFAD) (Slovak: Vysoká škola výtvarných umení v Bratislave, abbr. VŠVU) is an academy in Bratislava, Slovakia. AFAD was founded in the year 1949 at the dawn of totalitarian regime in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. For next forty years, the institution was under the pressure of political doctrine promoting so called socialist realism in arts, as well as suffering the political purges affecting badly the whole society. In spite of troubled historical development and atmosphere of repression, at AFAD there were few spheres of so called “positive deviation”. The resistance to the orthodoxy of socialist realism was made possible thanks to the intellectual and artistic background...