on the Gallery Weekend Budapest festival of contemporary art

Beyond the Obvious

Hajnalka Tarr

J. Nagy Andrs

PostContemporary

Published at Hyperallergic as

In Budapests Galleries, Female Artists Make Their Mark

http://hyperallergic.com/238699/in-budapests-galleries-female-artists-make-their-mark/

On September 13, I lightly followed the Sunday flow of the Gallery Weekend Budapest

festival of Hungarian contemporary art. Granted, a flow far less desperate and depressing

than the refuge flood surging through Budapest that week. This lesser and far more merry

current, organized for the second time by the Association of Contemporary Galleries and

Creative Platform Contemporary Art Foundation, transported me through unpretentious

galleries that chiefly featured work by women artists.

In general, I found that the Budapest galleries are modest in scale, unassuming, and

earnest in a way that validates significant contemporary art. Several works formally

played with a dark, Romantic Goth style that recalls the work of Annette Messager. I saw

little of the cynicism emblematic of a thick swath of New York and Paris art production.

Instead, a general inward, cantankerous, and slightly surreal aesthetic is prevalent here.

(There is a distinctive lack of performance video that I found merciful.)

I drew my focus on the three-gallery (Dek Erika, Inda, and Viltin) exhibition Beyond the

Obvious, curated by Zita Srvri. The show gathers the work of 22 women artists from

across Central Eastern Europe who explore the current positions women artists assume in

Hungary and the CEE region. Subjects range from personal narratives, collective history,

relations to the body, archiving, and the everyday.

At Viltin, Petra Feriancova (from Bratislava, Slovakia) has a sprawling installation that

brought back to mind the work of Eva Kottkova, whose installations incorporate

fragments of old printing machines from 1960s Czechoslovakia. I found Feriancovas

Things That Happen, Things That Are Done (2014) mixed media piece very intriguing

in the way that its odd, veiled forms evoke hidden, perhaps broken, machine parts or

possibly clunky forms from nature.

I found the array of works at Inda Gallery to be imbued with an ardent, feminine

sensitivity that felt personal, expressive, symbiotic, and sometimes confrontational. Using

classical media, the works explore attitudes to the body, religious beliefs, home, the past,

and obsessions with the self. Typical of the painterly fruits to be had here is the pale

figure/ground merger that happens in Moizer Zsuzsas shy oil painting The space

between us (2014). This paintings figure/ground fusion is quite opposite to the

push/pull acrobotics happening in Andrea Tivadars breezy painting Untitled 18 (2015)

and in Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermairs stark, mesmerizing Op painting Them and Us

(2012), both at Dek Erika.

There is also a nice figure/ground (con)fusion at work in Budapest artist Mria Chilfs

peculiar Family album (2015) drawing-on-photo that, like Zsuzsas work, equally

questions our place within the wilds of nature. The sculptor Ioana Nemes extended this

thought with her quirky and compelling Stove (2009), a conceptual stove based on

those in traditional Romanian houses where people cooked, dried clothes (or cheese), and

slept during cold winters. The brown, wooden bowls came from an antique fair in

Bucharest and two pieces of cheese are stamped with archaic motifs and then cast in

bronze and gilded. The work asks us to consider ways in which humans have lived

through the hardest aspects of the natural world.

Tarr Hajnalka presented the finest solo body of post-conceptual work. Her show

Transitional Space at acb Gallery was outstanding for its elegant, formal, and theoretical

threads. Hajnalka creates a system of relations and coordinates that call to mind both how

we stitch ourselves together and the digital basis of todays net environment. I like that

her forms reminded me of Judy Rifkas tough, formalist paintings on plywood from the

late 1970s. But Hajnalkas works are much more rhythmicly intricate, and I became lost

in both my own thoughts and her artistic process.

Like Rifka, Hajnalkas base medium is plywood, onto which she collages line structures,

plotted and drawn using wire and fishing line. Several particularly robust pieces featured

a background made by interlacing pages from the Concise Dictionary of the Hungarian

Language. The complex gemoetric networks in these artworks suggest the impossibility

of conceptually grasping the outside world. A few appeared to be like impenetrable

abstract concrete poems laced with geometric overlays that seem to me to refer to the

dynamics of the artistic process itself.

I did find a fine, lonely male solo show in the lady-heavy day with J. Nagy Andrss fine

square photography show Senki nem ltta ktszer (No One Saw It Twice) at

KnollGarlriaBudapest. Born in Hungary, the artist grew up in the South Bronx and

South Brooklyn and subsequently lived in various cities on several continents,

documenting the diverse environments in which he found himself, often populated

with homeless people or drug addicts. Starting 2010, he captured scenes of the lives of

those unwanted homeless residents of the streets of Budapest or other European cities,

using a peephole perspective made with a hidden, self-made camera. His The Anti-

model (2014) portrays something of the suspension of time.

Chimera-Project, by building its program on thematic exhibitions, generated a

meaningful discourse around artistic and social topics. Its PostContemporary show was a

rich, complex exploration of social surveillance and crowd control issues. This

conceptual and graphics-heavy show was curated by Lszl Beke, professor of

interdisciplinary studies at the Magyar Kpzomvszeti Egyetem, and general director of

the Mcsarnok in Budapest. Through its founders, Patrick Urwyler, a Swiss art historian

and curator, and Bogi Mittich, a Hungarian sociologist, Chimera-Project has a strong

international and social orientation, and, according to the curator Lszl Beke, The

PostContemporary is not simply a new art course, but rather a situation, a condition

[that] leans on the elements of the postmodern [while] dealing with the heritage of post-

communism and post-socialism and neo-marxism.

Art is witness to the constant exchanges occurring in our world, which include the

transfer of capital, ideas, myths, and people, whose precondition to migrate inspires the

enormous, worldwide migration of images. It is through this migratory reality for

better or worse that arts new stories intermingle and exchange.

Joseph Nechvatal

Agnieszka Grodzinska, collage "Museum (2013)

Petra Feriancova, "Things That Happen, Things That Are Done" (2014) mixed media

Andrea Tivadar, Untitled 18 (2015), 180 x 140 cm, oil on canvas

.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair, "Them and Us (2012) 150 x 150 cm, gouache on wood

Inda Gallery

Moizer Zsuzsa, "The space between us (2014) 150 x 100 cm, oil on canvas

Ioana Nemess Stove (2009) mixed media, 107 cm x 90 cm x 30 cm

Mria Chilf, Family album (2015) 42 x 30 cm, drawing on photo

Tarr Hajnalka, "R.I.M.F. (Rlts Idom Materializldsi Folyamat 04) / Overall View -

Profile - Materialisational Process 04" (2015) mixed media, 81,9 x 49,5 x 2,1 cm

Tarr Hajnalka, "R.I.M.F. (Rlts Idom Materializldsi Folyamat 05 a) / Overall View

- Profile - Materialisational Process 05 a" (2015) mixed media, 50,1 x 79 x 1,8 cm

Tarr Hajnalka

Hajnalka Tarr, "Untitled" (2015) mixed technique, 82x102 cm

Tarr Hajnalka show Transitional Space at acb Gallery

J. Nagy Andrs, "The Anti-model" (2014) Digital Photography, ed. 1/5, 25x25 cm

J. Nagy Andrs installation (partial view) No One Saw It Twice at

KnollGarlriaBudapest.

Lepsnyi Imre, Postcontempocene (2015)

Kerekes Pter Jnos, Das digitale Diktatur (2015) mixed media.