Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava

Bratislava, Slovakia

The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava (AFAD; Slovak: Vysoká škola výtvarných umení v Bratislave, VŠVU) is an academy in Bratislava, Slovakia.

It was founded in 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 of some of the professors and their personal approach to their students. After years of totalitarianism, in 1989 the AFAD was one of the few higher education institutions in the country where the whole teaching staff was re-selected in an open competition. Since then many changes in educational profile and academic life of students and faculty had been taking place. As a result, today the AFAD is a present—day oriented school offering study in three levels (bachelor, master and doctoral) and five specific fields: Fine Arts, Design, Architecture, Restoration, and Theory and History of Arts.