Art historian Tamás Fehérvári will open the exhibition, which includes work by Katharina Roters, Ferenc Ficzek Jr., Diána Bóbics, Eszter Tari, and Barna Leitner. Art historian Viki Vass is the show?s curator.
7-17 March: Katharina Roters: "Paintings"
Katharina Roters's paintings are inspired by personal experiences. However, Roters does not present her impressions and life events in usual narrative form to viewers. The viewer sees only details of the particular venues and environs, and the persons involved also remain unknown, with only a single body part or piece of clothing referring to them in most cases. Roters avoids the academic rules of presentation and her works resemble children's drawings. One needs to surrender conscious thinking in order to understand these intensely colourful dreamlike pictures. Roters's paintings demand active viewer participation: they call on the viewer to put his or her personal story together through the tiny pieces of reality presented.
21-31 March: Ferenc Ficzek Jr.
Ferenc Ficzek's works suggest enthrallment with nature. Rather than "presenting" things, Ficzek aims to create artificial surfaces identical with organic surfaces. In his recent paintings, Ficzek captures living plants, wood and bark, stones, and various organic materials. It takes careful observation to see that Ficzek's wall-mounted objects are indeed two-dimensional paintings precisely mirroring the original textures. Original and imitated forms smoothly unite in Ficzek's works at times, whereas in other cases he creates a well-defined division between the various qualities, offering a clue to the process of artistic presentation.
4-14 April: Diána Bóbics: "ugly but beautiful"
Diána Bóbics has observed apparently insignificant moments in everyday life for years. In her "First Aid" series, Bóbics has chiefly painted and drawn injuries on her own body. Bóbics wanted to use an intermediate form of expression different from traditional forms to suit her topic, eventually finding shimmering, transparent materials. Not only the genre of Bóbics's works is difficult to define -- graphics with a painting effect -- but the contrast between the unusual exhibition space theme and the refined quality of the works themselves also inspires tension. Rather than shocking viewers, Bóbics calls attention to how fragile and impermanent the human body is.
18-28 April: Eszter Tari
Shoes are in the centre of Eszter Tari's work. The shoes presented by Tari are not just things to wear but independent living creatures reflecting the personality of the individual wearing them, with the capacity to evoke situations without as much as the artist showing a detail of their owner. Tari's way of presenting shoes is provocative and ironic at once. Shoes appear as an exciting aspect of cultural history and the subject of Tari's research, but also function as raw material. To create her shoe reliefs, Tari paints and dissects her shoes, stripping them of their original features to lend them new form and shape.
2-12 May: Barna Leitner
Barna Leitner is a versatile artist looking at contextual relations between various art forms. Only partly a conceptual artist, Leitner focuses on questions analysing contemporary art and its function. However, as opposed to the limited tools used by conceptual art, Leitner's works suggest a love of materials and continuous experimentation with genres. Leitner uses a cult film -- Stanley Kubrick's ?A Clockwork Orange? -- for his latest works. The aluminium sheet-mounted graphics combine the formal features of various media. The uniform colour patches and the definite contours evoke the world of cartoons and applied graphics, whereas the proportions of the pictures adhere to that of the celluloid frame. Leitner has picked a number of images from the original film to compose his own version of ?A Clockwork Orange?. Leitner's goal was not to interpret the film, but to examine the afterlife of the image types that have become common visual culture heritage.
The Retorta Gallery is at Széchenyi utca 3 in Budapest?s District V..
Image: Eszter Tari
Source: artnet.hu
