Public and Private Collections in Dialogue
A discussion with Gábor Ébli
Patrick Tayler
As a sample of many years of research, Gábor Ébli published in 2020 an English-language book intended for an international audience. The multifaceted suggestions of the volume shed light on the possible personal motivations behind collecting art and the dialogue with collection strategies at national and regional levels. A shorter version of this interview appeared in the 6th print issue of Új Művészet in Hungarian. This extended discussion aims to provide insight into some of the key issues covered by the author.
The Weight of Painting
An Interview with Sean Scully and Dávid Fehér concerning Scully's retrospective titled Passenger
Patrick Tayler
An internationally significant exhibition of Sean Scully’s work opened in the October of 2020 at the Hungarian National Gallery. Due to the pandemic, the exhibition titled Passenger was closed for several months, but now the visitors have a chance to look at it for a few more days. Walking among the paintings emitting a radiant presence, the viewer involuntarily focuses on the physical act of looking at paintings and the enthralling, direct experience of the artworks. Following the curatorial narrative formulated by art historian Dávid Fehér, the exhibition presents the thematic chapters of the artist’s consistent painting practice in a complex manner. In my interview, I talked with the artist as well as the curator of the exhibition. The following discussion was published in Hungarian in the print edition of the journal in November 2020.
![“Exit From the White Cube Ghetto” Interview with Peter Bencze, founder and organizer of the hybrid institution of Everybody Needs Art [ENA]](https://ujmuveszet.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/84020035.jpg)
“Exit From the White Cube Ghetto”
Interview with Peter Bencze, founder and organizer of the hybrid institution of Everybody Needs Art [ENA]
Patrick Tayler
In this series of interviews, Új Művészet presents non-profit, for-profit, commercial and internationally relevant galleries. These conversations reveal how certain institutions were affected by the pandemic, and what kind of online and offline strategies were developed to confront current situations. Today we are asking Péter Bencze, founder and organizer of the hybrid institution Everybody Needs Art [ENA].
Dust of Angels
John Chiara's artist residency in Budapest Art Factory
Takács Lívia
The Budapest Art Factory welcomed Californian photographer John Chiara for the second time since 2017 for a two-months artist residency. In the beginning of the summer 2019 Budapest Art Factory presented his residency-end solo exhibition titled ‘Dust of Angels’: a series of the street scenes and landscape photographs in portrait format bustling with color.
ALL EARS?
Botond Keresztesi: Van Gogh’s Airbnb
Patrick Tayler
Painters, like Botond Keresztesi, bring back distant visual triggers, for those who still have some unfinished mission in the virtual sphere: a save slot left unopened for too long, an uncaught apple, a motorbike levitating since the last millennium. Instead of recreating previous experiences – and the resulting emotional-cognitive reactions – on a technically more advanced platform, Keresztesi deploys the ancient practice of painting to recontextualise digital and non-digital fragments.
Guarding Beauty
Ádám Dallos’s one-man show Mercurius with Crying Dragon
Patrick Nicholas Tayler
Ádám Dallos exhibited three large-scale oil paintings – Boy with Crying Dragon (2019), Mercurius with Crying Dragon (2019), Bleeding Eye Bull Begins to Cry (2019) – that each show an individual male nude in the company of a monster. The mythical beasts complete the human figures as attributes of an awakening power, as projected spirits of testosterone, or in other words, a guarding presence hovering above the exposed bodies.
Purple Prose
Orsolya Lia Vető's exhibition
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
Zooming in on flowers and fruit in the series Plantscape, Orsolya Lia Vető is not squeamish concerning the alluring, the decorative in her painting practice. The communicative urge that drives the aesthetics of kitsch is condensed into individual signs, that cease to denote separate morphological units and instead hook-up in a hybrid inflorescence, merging in a despecific corporality.
Whitecube Wunderkammer
Sekrestye – Unixpected
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
Sekrestye is a Budapest-based, loosely defined group of artists whose collective movements are centred around a series of exhibitions and events arranged predominantly in private places, introducing a fresh, off-track attitude to the art scene of the Hungarian capital. Surfacing gradually from the depths of social media and appearing sporadically in different venues, the group’s fifth exhibition was installed in the two visually transformed exhibition halls of Art9 Gallery and presented a visual jam session, that contextualised personal voices within a common vision.
BUMm
an introductory group exhibition of the resident artists of Atelier Budakalász
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
There are places in suburban Budapest where artists tinker around in weird hours, working on pieces that can be described with a collection of contradictory terms: edgy, ephemeral, toy-like, pseudo-scientific, Blade Runneresque, sacred, sacrilegious, modified, recontextualised, assisted, remixed, etc., deploying tactics that unsettle the norms of art. They sometimes utilise the tools of the film industry, of fine mechanics or of any other area connected to the construction of illusions and palpable realities.
Ritual Trail to Self
Patrícia Jagicza and Patrícia Kaliczka’s exhibition
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
The self-portrait reveals traces of an impossible distance – an out-of-body experience, that proposes selfhood through a kind of informed schizophrenia. If “presence is impossible except as co-presence”, who is this other I share myself with? Is the dichotomy of artist and model relevant in this case? Is the mirror or camera – the technical facade – the real eyewitness to this emergence of the self?
RIGHT CLICK – FREE TRANSFORM
Róbert Batykó’s Solo Exhibition “Red Eye”
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
There is a pre-programmed quality in Batykó’s work, it operates on the border of the visual culture of digital technology, the logic of picture editing software and process art. Instead of a file’s invisible transformation, Batykó’s work deploys an organic substance and not a binary system. The image is fixed onto the hard-drive of easel painting: hitting ctrl+alt+z doesn’t work here, neither is there space for any further modification. The interface is frozen.
The view from an armchair: on the brink of a season that never existed
József Pinczés’s Solo Exhibition at Villa Lívia
Tayler Patrick Nicholas
Due to the personal iconography of Pinczés (that he has been consistent with in the years), there is always a conversation between the discernible temporal layers. A giraffe, a balloon, a magpie can appear as a symbol of the artist’s presence: connecting the oeuvre not only on stylistic grounds but also symbolically. In the painting Master and Student (2018), Pinczés depicts a robot mouse – the exact object that served as the starting point for Zsigmond Károlyi’s painterly investigations in 2005 – in the company of a slightly asymmetrical, playful toy monkey.