The Burden of History

Gábor Roskó created one of the most exciting oeuvres in figurative painting in the eighties, representing an utterly individual voice on the art scene dominated by new sensuality. Beside his practice as a painter he made a great number of graphics in the nineties while also experimenting with ceramics.

His works are populated by biblical kings, classical heroes, celebrities, and figures of historical allusions. This is a truly postmodern oeuvre, which contemplates the narratives of modernity and modernism from the Enlightenment to the war on terror with an ironic sense of aloofness and criticism.

Solomon, David, Odysseus, Achilles, King St. Stephen, Descartes, Sándor Rózsa, Madonna, and Cindy Crawford exist in the same fictitious, fragmented, and allegorical painterly space, which brings History itself, and historic reality, alive through its numerous delicate references. Roskó creates not only an exquisite Budapest-based private mythology with his fox-faced David, Sándor Rózsa with the looks of Frank Zappa, and Osama bin Laden depicted as a Persian ruler, but also makes viewers uncertain whether history is real and universal.

The show itself displays Roskó’s life-work from the early gigantic paintings through fine graphics and watercolour to the latest ceramics installations – from the end of the seventies up to the present – mainly based on private collections and the materials of the First Hungarian Visions Collection and the King St. Stephen Museum.

The exhibition at Modem first gathers the most important pieces of Roskó’s career of over thirty years; and the catalogue designed to accompany the show attempts to put Roskó’s work into an international perspective that is hallmarked by the artworks of Jeff Koons and Jake & Dinos Chapman beyond merely introducing them.