The upcoming exhibition once again features an important work from Imre Bak’s oeuvre in the space named after the artist. This time, the Imre Bak space is showcasing the 2003 work titled The Non-Existent Existent I. The painting was created at a turning point in his career, when Imre Bak’s art once again turned toward the fundamental questions of geometric abstraction: how can the illusion of space be created on the picture plane, and how can colors and forms become independent carriers of meaning.
The title of the work, which also appears on the cover of the 2004 Imre Bak catalog written by István Hajdu, paradoxically refers simultaneously to presence and absence, visibility and imagination — to that peculiar state in which the painted form appears real while existing solely within the space of the image. In Bak’s art, geometric order is never merely a formal issue: behind the strict structures always lies the possibility of space, memory, and association.
The Non-Existent Existent I is a condensed formulation of this line of thought, which already foreshadows the metaphysical spatial experiences of the artist’s later period, as well as the semantic openness of geometric abstraction. The painting by Imre Bak presented in the acb Bak Imre space evokes not only an outstanding work from the early 2000s, but also the painterly problem that has accompanied the artist’s entire oeuvre: how can painting make visible that which does not actually exist.