Exhibition

Attila József: Consciousness (detail), 1934

Like a pile of hewn timber
the world lies heaped up on itself,
one thing presses and squeezes and
interlocks with the other,
so each is determined.
Only what is not has a bush,
only what will be is a flower,
what is crumbles into fragments.
(Translated by Michael Beevor)

The exhibition title SEASHORE serves as a framework for comprehension of artworks. Ono ne hand, it refers to sea creatures predominant in the series. On the other hand, it creates a metaphorical understanding between sharply splitting edges of mosaics and the threshold aspect of a shore. The seashore is a border which divides but also connects sea and land. A transit zone, as it were. Accordingly, it can be understood as a fine intersection betwixt two natural element – earth and water.

The main question of the current exhibition is that where and how (whether if it’s even necessary or plausible at all) to draw the line between abstraction and figuration. This transition of paradigms pressured many artists of the 20. century to make such an inquiry. Works of SEASHORE deal with a similar dilemma. The artist takes objects as foundations of his art, nevertheless, by the end of the artistic process the final products are fragmented, compressed, abstract compositions that can only be apprehended as a whole. In the non-figurativity of the SEASHORE series one can see fragments of a memory. These paintings try to show the possibility of articulating abstract feelings in the context of objects. In such a way they seem to obscure the abstracion-figurativity distinction.

Artworks of the SEASHORE series are dynamic on levels of composition and physical structure as well. As social power-dynamics are depicted via the allegory of movement and rythym on artworks of Francis Bacon, so does a similar dynamism formulate through the artificial rearrangement of structure in the works of this present exhibition.  In the artworks tranquillity prevails, a sort of nature morte, where stillness known from classical painting transubstantiates into dynamic flow by riven objects of silence. Nature’s discomposed perfection echoed in intermittent arrangements.