Category Archives: contemporary art

Friss (Fresh) 2012

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Arpad Szigeti, “Hungray”

Friss 2012, up at Kogart Haz on Andrassy until October 12, is an annual show of recent graduates here in Budapest, and as the show is named “Fresh” you can imagine its idea is to introduce new artists to the scene. This year new graduates from Switzerland were also included. There were some really lovely works, and I thought very internationally engaged, which the curators selected and organized around the theme of empathy/manipulation. This theme came with a warning from the curators: that no one was innocent. I can’t speak to that, but here are some of the works I found interesting and accomplished.

Otto Szabo, Ethnographic Research

Otto Szabo’s installation of an embroidered veil and photographs illustrate how Muslim head coverings became a part of traditional Hungarian folk costumes. The floating head in front of old photographs was an affecting and interesting visual object, and the research behind it fascinating. This installation lies more on the empathetic side of the continuum the curators set up.

Anna Gyurkovics, image from the photo series Papa

As does Anna Gyurkovics’s photography series Papa, which has a great quality of light, intimacy, and immediacy. More of the artist’s work is up on Flikr.

Zsofia Toth, Keretek

Zsofia Toth’s Keretek, or Frames, are large paintings that take on some of the traditions around the presentation of art. This speaks more to the manipulation side of the continuum.

Balint Radoczy, Still from video What We Are

Balint Radoczy‘s video installation, What We Are, shows detritus in the confluence of a particular bend of the Tiber, floating and circulating in an endless loop. The beautiful colors of the trash belies their worthless, even dirty, state.

David Siepert, image from Censored Dresses

From the Swiss contingent, David Siepert took advertisements from magazines where flesh had been covered over. Then he hired people to remake the conservative dresses, turning Muslim attitudes toward showing flesh into real clothes that didn’t previously exist and showed them in a fashion show and with photographic evidence. His well-executed project, like Szabo’s in that it puts cultural norms in the spotlight, brings  an anthropological approach to culture together with both empathy and manipulation.

 

HMC’s Library Thoughts 2

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Detail, Traveler’s cup 2

This diverse collection of artwork, often related to book arts or Budapest, come from artists all over the world. The Hungarian Multicultural Center’s “Library Thoughts 2” is up at MAGYAR ÍRÓSZÖVETSÉG at Bajza utca 18 in Budapest through September 28. Relating to foreigners’ interactions and reactions to a city that is new to me as well, I enjoyed seeing how others interpreted their experiences. The photograph above shows a statue of St. Stephen (Istvan) on Fisherman’s Bastion, which is on the Buda hills overlooking the Danube and Pest, in the background.

Joo Yean Woo, Traveler’s cup (1, 2, and 3)

Joo Yean Woo’s photographs are meant to examine how the act of collecting can be a more creative process, documenting and archiving experience in a more personal way. Perhaps a good thing for me to be thinking about during my time here.

Xu Yun, Homage to Franz Liszt

Detail, Homage to Franz Liszt

Two other works I liked, Xu Yun’s installation and Marlene Alt’s series of Baroque medallions, responded to Budapest’s Baroque heritage. Homage to Franz Liszt hangs from an ornate chandelier. The transparent sheets feature Liszt’s music as well as the decorative emblem of Hungary, what might be thought of as quintessentially Hungarian symbols, while Alt’s blank clay tiles in different colors have their gilt rubbed off much the way buildings here show their age. They deal with a long artistic heritage, as the title Portraits, Nudes, Heaven, Earth suggests, and refer to the opulent frames that usually hold traditional works of art.

 

Marlene Alt, Portraits, Nudes, Heaven, Earth

 

 

Kusama at the Whitney (a belated post from Hungary)

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Note: I meant to send this before I left for Hungary, and then have a fresh start about Hungarian art…but here this draft is, sitting and waiting to be published. So…

Self-Portrait, 1972. Collage with pastel, ballpoint pen, and ink on paper.

Yayoi Kusama courted and received a lot of attention in New York in the 1960s for her truly groundbreaking and unique work. It’s how the Whitney Museum of American Art can justify having the Japanese artist’s retrospective on view, despite her having lived most of her life in Japan, as she still does today. Kusama has her trademark polka dot works up, supported by some works from the beginning of her career, documentation about her activities in the 60s in New York, and a final roomful of her most recent paintings, all atop each other like the inside of a Kusamaesque Rubik’s cube.

The exhibition allows you to see how themes develop in her career–her initial white dot paintings become dots she paints on people to “obliterate” them, which becomes the undulating patterns of her paintings in the 2000s. She also returns to soft, abstract sculptural forms reminiscent of the body and of Louise Bourgeois, at multiple points.

Man Catching the Insect, 1972. Collage with oil on paper.

Her collage works, two examples of which are shown here, don’t fit as neatly into these patterns. They aren’t as clean and graphic design-y as her current works, but I found them as strong as anything else in the show. The more literally evoke Surrealism and the exploration of consciousness, but they do it in a very Kusama (note the polka dots) and very accomplished way. They are one of the rare times her obsessive attention to detail combines with recognizable imagery. Kusama is notoriously and publicly of a “fragile mental state,” to quote the artist herself, and these works show again how that mental instability plays into and feeds her artistic production.