Miklos Gulyas at Mai Mano

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I went to Mai Mano to check out the Vivian Maier show, and the Art Nouveau building itself, but then discovered some recent street photography by Miklos Gulyas in a show upstairs.

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The artist says of the works that:

“When I go out into the streets, I often seem to find that, among other things, common sense is missing most. Poverty and barrenness are not unusual phenomena; as we lived in some sort of ongoing, ridiculous, unnecessary indulgence where, slowly, practicality becomes deviance.”

This critical social viewpoint becomes clear as one sees all the images the flaneur has collected on his walks around Budapest. I especially like the American flag track suit and the Rubik’s cube purse, and all the amalgamation of culture in between, in a style Gulyas calls “caricature-realism.”

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Graveyard of Socialist Statuary: Memento Park

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Ah, the strong, clean lines of Social Realism! Memento Park, just outside Budapest, houses a collection of Socialist/ Communist statuary that formerly decorated the city in a solution to the problem of what to do with these markers of the Soviet past. Rather than destroy them or leave them where they were, some of the statues of Lenin (my personal favorite) and other heroes of the Soviet satellite state, were gathered here. Photos below, and my own ‘tribute’ to Lenin in video form here.

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Planking and Hitchcock: Paintings by Attila Szucs

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Attila Szucs‘ recent show of paintings at Erika Deak Gallery focused on planking, the recent social phenomena where people lay stiff as boards in incongruous places. The painter often starts from images from the media or photos and surrounds them with emptiness, here applied to people planking. I don’t think the works convincingly suggest an existentialist vacuum, if that was what Szucs meant to imply, and to me the figures remain ridiculous rather than some kind of metaphysical argument about the place of the individual in the universe. Perhaps the association of planking with humor is just too strong in my mind.

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However, his paintings are wonderfully executed. The large canvas of the Hitchcockian blonde, my favorite work in the show, on all fours suggests as much. Her conventional femininity, anachronistic in its hairstyle and clothing, becomes vulnerable, the direct gaze impenetrable. Her shadow double mirrors the outline of the room she occupies.

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