New wave

The group exhibition at acb Gallery, featuring several new artists, endeavours to summarise recent trends in painting. Over the past few years, the youngest generation of painters have brought new interpretations of figurality to the fore.

The artists now emerging on the scene instinctively seek to redefine the figure, which always comes to represent a story or narrative on the canvas. As, in our day and age, a personal tone, storytelling, and an ego- and brand-centred approach have become the most effective means of communication, it is no coincidence that the figure – the hybrid human image – of our time, has, in some manner, also returned to the epicentre of painting.

Today’s figurality simultaneously incorporates the instinctive approach of gesture painting, the excessive referentiality of pop culture, and the attraction and repulsion inherent in the lessons learned from abstract art. As another important element of this complex constellation, artists, in the name of figurativity, are mostly concerned with creating their own signature painting style. In this way, figurality primarily becomes a means, rather than an end.

Exhibiting artitsts: László von Dohnányi, Mátyás Erményi, Barnabás ?Lakatos Gelléri, Fruzsina Kiss?, Anne Neukamp