Visual artist Tamás Ábel graduated from the glass department of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design exactly ten years ago. This anniversary also marks a turning point in his art, opening up new paths for the future. Our exhibition aims to present these changes in his art, while each object refers back to events of the past ten years.
The title of the exhibition also refers to these processes. We live in a time of accelerated environmental and technological transformation, but our own continuous physical changes struggle to keep pace with the speed and changes. Despite the increasing number of social media platforms and chat applications, we can become increasingly lonely if we do not immerse ourselves in the infinite digital space to an appropriate extent. Our tendency toward addiction involuntarily draws us into anything that distracts us even slightly from reality, from the everyday tasks we need to complete, from the thought of our problems. These small, everyday addictions give us happiness or a temporary respite from negative burdens and help us get through even the most difficult times.
The exhibition tells the story of his own transformation through glass sculptures, photographs, and a large–scale site–specific installation made of fiberglass. It shows how slowly and with how much difficulty he managed to recognize and transform his various addictions, intolerances, traumas, and their consequences, whether they be food and drink, gambling, possessiveness, disorder, or loneliness. He also wants to show the way out, the breakaway, the true companionship and the opportunities that helped him. He wants to express all this in a narrative form by combining glass, geometry, and realism.
To illustrate the theme outlined above, new works of art are being created that examine the causes of these processes (bad habits, illness, trauma) and their solutions (good habits, healing, transformation) through visual artistic expression.
In keeping with the theme, the exhibition features not only glass sculptures but also video works, sculptural works placed in space, site-specific glass installations, and two-dimensional wall-mounted works, all created using media that have been used previously.