chamber hall - 11 November 2023 - 21 January 2024
The Vasarely Museum Budapest continues its tradition this autumn in presenting outstanding contemporary artists of international geometric abstract painting through a solo exhibition. From the beginning of November until the end of January, the public can see the solo exhibition entitled Networks by Ádám Szentpétery, a Hungarian artist from Slovakia, in the chamber hall of the museum.
At the beginning of his career, Ádám Szentpétery, Munkácsy Prize-winning painter and art educator was inspired by the stylistic power of Victor Vasarely and the freedom of optical art. In the oppressive cultural and political climate of the 1980s, he became one of the pioneers of abstract-geometric art in Slovakia and today he has become the doyen of non-figurative Slovakian fine art. His oeuvre is organically integrated into the Central European tradition of constructivism and concrete art.
The basis of Szentpétery’s painting is classical modern (avant-garde) constructivism, which he combines with the geometric language of Hungarian neo-avant-garde painting of the seventies and eighties. His creative activity can also be linked referentially to the work of Victor Vasarely. He was interested in extending art to a wider audience as well as questions about the possible relationship between geometric and kinetic art and architecture. In addition to his numerous public mural works, his large-scale paintings over the past twenty-five years have become emblematic today, despite the fact that geometric abstract art has still not managed to create sufficient reference space in the broader cultural and aesthetic model of contemporary Slovakian painting. Thus, his oeuvre can be regarded as a continuation of a wider Hungarian and later European painting tradition. The visuality of his tondos, their optical illusion, and his square paintings based on examining the balance between central and decentral compositions can be paralleled with op-art paintings by Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley.
From the early period of Szentpétery’s work, a prominent character is the freehand-drawn, unmasked, disciplined gesture. This element of his art is constantly changing, but it has retained its characteristic to this day, which is the representation of a rectilinear slowly fading vertical, horizontal, or diagonal vector on the surface of the painting. Since 2007 he has been interested in the real and latent idea of the spatial depth of the image plane, his angular canvases often change into circular shapes, thus changing the shaping of visible space. It projects its previous straight lines onto a spherical surface through projective geometry and sets them in motion. At the same time, the “curvature” of space into planes, the three-dimensional illusion of his works, also reflects the progress of technologies – computer modelling and digital manipulations. Its monumental tondos can also be interpreted as visual “data spheres”. What is typical in his paintings is the use of pure colours, which are often “hit” and covered with white or black.
His current solo exhibition entitled Networks presents the main works of the four parallel creative programmes of the past ten years. His eponymous painting cycle is represented by five large tondos and distorted circle (oval) shaped images. The spirit and pure colours of his panel paintings Rotation and Monoton, composed of large homogeneous surfaces, can be contextualised with concrete art and the minimalist painting of Imi Knoebel, in such a way that he gives an important role to the circular arc in his construction with an individual character. Within his oeuvre, the atypical Covid series (2020-2022) acts as a memento to recall the biggest pandemic of the last hundred years. In their use of colours, they remain with the classical modern (avant-garde) pure colours but differ from other works in a number of characteristics in their method of painting and composition. The patterns of Covid paintings float separated and isolated in endless space, thus breaking the interconnected, networked structure characteristic of the artist.
Curated by Tibor iski Kocsis.
The exhibition is realised in cooperation with VILTIN Gallery.
