"Today, painting is the best-known form of contemporary art in Hungary. This is the art form that is most influenced by fashion and the visual environment, and this is the area where the most varied output meets with the most diverse expectations of collectors and exhibition goers.This is why we take up the challenge and try to point out those new tendencies and phenomena that may be the markers of future directions and values in painting.
In recent years, the issue most contested in the profession was the relationship of photography and painting. Very diverse positions have emerged as to what value, technique or realism is; even the very tradition of what is one of the oldest art forms has been redefined time and again. At the same time, the very debate may have made us blind to those phenomena that may open new, alternative directions for painters.
What are the new directions? How to proceed? These were the questions that guided us when we chose the artists to be featured at Uncut Version. This selection presents a lesser-known and little studied field in Hungarian painting. These painters use psychic phenomena, visions, or the indirect representation of the human world, as their starting point. Their work strongly relies on a technique whose focus is not the reproduction of reality but painterliness. The pieces often abandon such traditional materials as oil paint and the canvas in their search for a representation of the world that values subjective commentary over objective imitation.
Uncut Version is our contribution to the debate: this selection of young and middle-aged painters exposes a lesser-known part of the Hungarian scene by highlighting the relationship of individual approaches.
The display emphasises attitudes and positions by presenting works in which referencing the environment, acknowledging objective reality as a source of inspiration, is coupled with the desire to subject this reality to a psychedelic rewriting, to use space in a subversive manner.
Some of the artists featured are well-known, important figures of the local scene, while the others are young, fresh-out-of-the-academy creators, or ones whose activity is less in the limelight. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue document the vision of a younger generation, their relationships to painterly traditions. There is no single term that would define all these works and aspirations; having diverse points of reference, they are comparable in their subjective understanding of reality, a strong capacity to create visions, and an analytical approach to the tradition.
Exhibiting artists: József Csató, Mária Chilf, Eszter Csurka, László András Hatházi, Gábor Király, János Korodi, Zsuzsa Moizer, Katharina Roters, Miklós Sas, Dorottya Szabó, Dávid Szentgróti, Emőke Varga.
Curators: Zsolt Petrányi, József Készman"
Showing from 8 December until 30 January 2008
Source: Ernst Museum
Address: 1065 Budapest, Nagymező utca 8.
Phone: 341-43-55
30.11.2007