Archives

The artist Enikő Márton, born in Hungary, seems to want to overcome spectra defined by colour theory. Each standardization opposes a fantastic world of diffraction and refraction. However, it is not explosions of colour that arise from her paintings | objects, but precisely calculated and spatially structured projections of one‘s own inner intuition and hope. Torn between harmony and dissonance, they resist separation from the experience of the very direct.

Enikő is concerned with the representation of emotions that directly emerge as open and changeable in the process of painting. She recognizes conflicting moments that only become conscious because they reveal themselves through her own process.

This extends to the feeling that the works show an interest in revealing themselves to her in the process of being created. Such images, in which we can recognize our own conflicts and, from there, even solve them, result in the creation of a space where you meet and find each other.

This becomes more understandable in the warm-hearted manner of the artist who directly addresses the fact that today more than ever one needs and seeks home. And she always seems to create a special atmosphere of security in her surroundings, with herself as a wind rose that folds colours into scents.

Ralf Bartholomäus, Berlin, 2019

>> portfolio

POST OWN PAGE >

One of the most important motifs of Barnabás Benkő‘s (1994) pictures is the gesture of hiding, covering up, not showing. His source of inspiration is street art and informal trends. The image surfaces divided by parallel strips are made up of several overlapping, masking layers, which create the illusion of different depths. We have the feeling that the original view was later covered with another layer, so that the one below is only partially accessible. The wild brush and spray marks emerging from the background open the range of interpretation to the dimension of time along with space; the visual traces of the events of the past seem to have been painted not by one but by several unknown hands, forming overlapping layers on the surface at different times. This aspect of the scene authentically evokes the competition of members, gestures, and signs appearing on graffitied factory fences, suburban concrete walls, and cracked plastered fire walls. In this visual cavalcade, the grid made of parallel strips creates some order, which on the one hand separates from the underlying layer, but on the other hand becomes an integral part of the scene in its color and patterns; it is integrated into the original, gestural system of the image. – János Schneller

POST OWN PAGE >

Familiar furniture, warm-colored patterns and aesthetic utility objects make Panni Marosi‘s (1994) interiors feel homely at first. However, after a longer observation, the deliberate ambiguity of the spatial relationships and proportions, the liquid dance of the plastic forms make the images similar to a psychedelic vision associated with an inner journey. The details, observed with a high degree of realism and painted with sensual brushwork, do not come together into some kind of hyperrealistic overall picture, but turn into a fairytale-like coloring book bearing the hallmarks of the surrealistic visual world of visions, dreams, and subconscious experiences. This interpretation is strengthened by the arrangement of the rooms, reminiscent of the forced homeliness of the stage-like psychotherapy clinics, in which the precious pieces of the visual culture and design of our past, as accessories burned into our collective memory, transport us to the idealized time of our childhood. In his pictures, we can often recognize small quotations from the works of artists held in high esteem by the artist. We can notice classic “picture in picture” scenes, or even specific compositional solutions, among others from the often stage-like compositions of Giorgio de Chirico, the founder of metaphysical painting. The artist invites us into the resulting surrealist interior, so that we can sink into the relaxed state in which the associations and ideas created by the painting can flow freely in our minds, reflecting on our own past.

>> portfolio

POST OWN PAGE >

Attila Stark is a Budapest-based artist. He studied graphics and illustration, although, among his works we can find murals, paintings, and publications as well. He also had his own visual albums published by Roham and Symposion. His fanzines and screen prints can be found at comic book festivals both in Hungary and abroad. Through his works, we get to know his personal world, which at first was based on the metropolitan environment, but gradually, the characters and motifs developing there got into new situations. Despite being dangerous and difficult, this world is also funny and without any aesthetic boundaries or censorship, where absurdity takes over existential suffering. Perverted ponies, luscious creatures, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, William Burroughs and others can be found in his intelligent, yet brutally raw artworks. However, they don’t stay for long to avoid becoming victims of some hidden passion.

What remains to be discussed in connection with these works, because it shines through them, is the complete feeling of life that we call underground. If someone’s career starts in the world of independent comics, draws and paints club flyers and band album covers for existential reasons, was active in street art, and uses words in his work that evoke subcultures, this is on the one hand under the influence of a free visuality and artistic approach, on the other hand but you can only be successful if you yourself are a part of, an experiencer, a sympathizer of an independent music world. – Zsolt Petrányi

By the way, this painterly language can also be easily recognized by its layering: while the lower part is more defined by the painterly qualities, the upper part is determined by the graphic qualities. After the large, pasty gestures have been added, Stark reaches for a thinner brush or oil chalk, perhaps a pen or varnish felt, with which he enriches the composition with more and more layers, thickening it with details and drawing elements. And although he juxtaposes these figures side by side, in the end they give off some kind of connection, and thus a narrative is born in the mind of the viewer. – Katica Kocsis

POST OWN PAGE >

The distinctiveness of Dóra Juhász’s lyrical abstract paintings is the usage of patterns. These are entities splitting the mellow but unsettling sensuality of the background, repeated in an almost orderly mode.Mostly helical, oval forms created in a non-expressive style and non-expressionist manner search their places in the composition. They are not floating in the background, nor in front of it, instead, they are woven into it without being absorbed.

1974. born in Budapest, lives and works in Budapest

POST OWN PAGE >

“My Kitin series revive my miserable childhood when I couldn’t get hold of expensive, western toy figures, so I was forced to make them myself with my modest tools. This habit is still very much alive in the Third World, although – ironically – nowadays these toys are being manufactured there. Since the raw material of this project is nothing more than Thai beetles and insects, I settled into the mental anguish of a Thai boy: because I can’t get the popular transformer toy figures, I walk out into the garden (jungle) and patch up something seemingly similar. The joke is that – in this performance – the result has the aesthetic qualities and appearance of its pop-cultural patterns. However, the manufacturing and the very es- sence of these pop-cultural patterns – business, consumerism, marketing, kitsch, Hollywood… – are in stark contrast to the essence of the tiny statues, such as: nature, craftsman- ship, unlimited fantasy, creation and respect…”

Unfolding in the duality of the passing away and preservation of the body, simultaneously mimetic and science-fictional artefacts are born from self-representative materials, which can thus be placed on the boundary between art and life. Science, fantasy, pop culture and sexuality are mixed in a sometimes bizarre spectacle. It was as if we had entered the workshop of a crazy taxidermist, a playful teenager, or a meat fetishist who models living creatures instead of trains. In the works, the flesh is indeed flesh, the fur is fur, and the chitin is indeed chitin. All this fills the viewer, who imperceptibly becomes a voyeur, with curiosity mixed with some uneasiness. – János Schneller

POST OWN PAGE >

“Take a color space, fill it with tiny people who all go their own way. In my images, people and spaces are arranged in specific rhythms, conveying the experience of movement, light and existence to their viewers.”

POST OWN PAGE >

“My Art is primarily based on the painting traditions of the American Abstract expressionism, the Modernism of the Second World War, as well as on local Hungarian painting traditions, and it can also be rooted back into existential philosophy. My main goal is to search and achieve full abstraction in my works of art.
The main theme of my first complete series of work ‘Psychological space’, which evolved at the beginning of the 2000′, still appears in my art up to these days. The ‘Psychological Space’ series refers to the inner power, and to the theoretical and philosophical systems of Modern painting, which I have learned from the lectures of my masters; Sándor Molnár and Tamás Lossonczy. Two of my other big series the ‘Soulflower’ and ‘The Dream of Dionysos’ where also born from the transformation of the above mentioned ‘Psychological Space’ series. These series are the projections of the psychological presence and personal gestures as well.
The fluctuation of intuitive gestures, incidents and consciously made incidents rule my works. In my pictures I discover the limits of Abstraction and my own self. An Egoless painterly path leads me, which becomes Art throughout the layers painted at different times in the process of creation. The brush resonates on the canvas’ membrane, and records the movements of the brush holder. The gesture records the moment. The Here and Now becomes a color patch. The existence, the physical existence itself becomes a trackable imprint, a paintpatch on the canvas. The conscious and the unconscious movement, the meditative concentration manifests on the brush, and on the surface of the canvas.
The big size paintings are always accompanied by the series of smaller graphics, which can be defined conceptually as the pre and post studies of the big ones. With these graphical and the photographical series, I consciously expand my limitations as a painter. By the studies of these limitations, my Art aims the state of full abstraction.”

>> portfolio

POST OWN PAGE >

For many years now Stefan Osnowski has been concerned with a new approach to wood engravings and has been developing the opportunities inherent to the technique. When preparing his enlarged engravings, he creates a range of tonal values through the variation of the width and depth of horizontal lines, as well as through the alteration of the density of the grid, whilst retaining a purely monochrome imagery. Doing so he applies a very particular printing technique: with the use of a palm-size glass lens he manually rubs the ink onto the paper instead of using a printing press, thus preserving the apparent uniqueness of each individual item in a series. Physical contact and hand-crafting is just as much a part of his artistic concept as the gathering of themes or the selection of the medium.

>> CV • PASSAGE CATALOGUE • PORTFOLIO

 

POST OWN PAGE >

‟Attila Kondor is less interested in hunting for ancient motifs than in searching for chances to have cathartic experiences of unity. But rather than keeping these chances to himself, he also shares them with his spectators. Thus in his life as well as in his artistic world the three agencies of reception aesthetics – author, work and receiver – can, indeed, conjoin in a unio mystica. This indicates a typical Kondorian synthesis: the coupling of medieval mysticism liberated by Aristotelian catharsis with Gademerian postmodern hermeneutics. The result is the creation of a philosophical-aesthetic space within which the ascetic artist of life offers his own experiences of catharsis to his audiences with a disposition to deep contemplation.” − Gábor Rieder

>> CV • PORTFOLIO

POST OWN PAGE >

In the categorization-defeating painture of András Braun (1967-2015) the formal solutions of op-art and certain techniques of pop-art – such as advertisement-picking and the multiplication of the motives of consumer society – meet with an intense urge to decorate with an almost organic form creation-technique, and this meeting results in unsurpassable square-shaped, mostly large-size paintings. These paintings are based on the multiplication of one main motive, however the technique applied is never uniform. Braun uses wallpaper paste, acrylic paint, oil, as well as premade molds, creating stirring, wild, intensive and profane mandalas that hypnotically attract the eye. Braun passed away unexpectedly in 2015.

We can discover several recurring visual elements among András Braun’s motifs; concentric or interpenetrating circular shapes, spheres, and shapes reminiscent of the retina of the eye or cells are common. These are mostly connected in a dynamic, organic composition that creates a sense of movement. The motifs circling around the center or several centers and developing from them are usually regular forms born as a result of human design, but they are arranged and developed not according to the rules of constructive image editing, but mostly following the regularity of natural processes (fractals). Forms created by the human mind begin to behave like natural forms; the work of art, the designed form, as if taking over the regularities of the organic forms of nature, would develop by itself, flourish and multiply. Just as the visual image dumping that surrounds us also takes on an almost independent life in a continuous (almost organic) evolution and system of effects, so a form system composed by Braun begins to live its own life. We feel the presence and proportions of the microcosm (cells, petals, bacteria) and the macrocosm (planets, galaxies, solar systems) at the same time.

>> CV • PORTFOLIO

POST OWN PAGE >