The Resident Art Gallery moved to Bartók Béla Street in July 2024 and opened its new exhibition space. In the two years since then, we have organized 15 exhibitions. Our current exhibition features the artists whose work we have showcased during this period. The past two years can be considered a period of growth in every respect, as not only has the gallery’s audience and number of regular visitors increased, but our artist community has also stabilized. In addition to solo exhibitions, we continue to organize our annual showcase, the Resident Art Fair, where we exhibit new works by young artists. Most of the works featured in the exhibition have not been shown at the gallery before; in fact, many of them have never been exhibited at all.
In Barnabás Benkő’s painting—which is built from monochromatic gestures and evokes graffiti — subdued, faded shades of off-white take the place of the usual garish colors. In the futuristic, posthuman visions of the artist duo CrocodilePOWER (Oksana Szimatova and Peter Golosapov), the visual world of digital imaging blends with organic, natural forms, creating biomorphic still lifes that draw the eye with their Baroque orgies of color, yet, due to their unidentifiability and reflective smoothness, the gaze is more often than not repelled by them. Viktória Kalán’s animal-headed human figures are placed within landscapes that are far too confining for them. The realistically painted landscapes thus resemble models more than actual scenes. At the same time, the grotesque atmosphere of the paintings related to climate anxiety actually alleviates this anxiety. In Konrád Kaszás’s abstract visions, positive and negative forms spread across the canvas, intertwining to create collage-like planes reminiscent of paper cutouts—sometimes evoking totems, other times the proliferation of plants. Attila Kondor’s paintings, which can best be regarded as contemplative objects—though they bear the closest resemblance to landscapes—are in fact far removed from the landscape in the traditional sense. These inner visions primarily convey a sense of timelessness and lingering in the present moment. Panni Marosi’s surreal, fluid landscapes emerge as a strange blend of dreams and childhood memories.
The view from enclosed spaces represents the boundary where the external and internal worlds meet — that is, it conveys the state of the mind as it balances on the strange threshold between dream and wakefulness. Through years of experimentation, Stefan Osnowski has transformed the ancient technique of woodcut printing. The unusual scale and unconventional technique result in unique prints that, through a one-of-a-kind and unrepeatable blending of colors and forms, produce visual images born of controlled chance. Eszter Ronga’s figures, placed within homogeneous fields of color, transform the plane into space. In his paintings, the uniform fields of color slowly dissolve into colorful gestures. Attila Stark’s richly colored paintings are populated by the clumsy figures of graffiti, the hybrid creatures of his own mythology, and a cavalcade of random, found inscriptions, seemingly disregarding any compositional order. Róbert Šwierkiewicz’s art is at once primitive and ancient, childlike and naive, and ultimately most mystical — yet it is best described by the concept of freedom. Balázs Szabó Lobot’s naive, childlike paintings are made recognizable by their limited, pure colors and a few recurring motifs. In his paintings, motifs from distant eras come together to create a unified, wild, and cozy visual world. In Barbara Szlávik’s monochromatic minimalism, the pictorial installation functions as an environment that engulfs the viewer by creating a space that is also sensually evocative.
The image — or, more accurately, the monumental structure of the images — enriches the purely two-dimensional experience by incorporating the third dimension. Dániel Tomecz’s paintings feature color-distorted versions of photographs found in his work. In his pictorial art, both chance and visual rhymes play an important role. One work each from Zoltán Tölg-Molnár’s completed body of work—the *Forgotten Language* series and the black paintings — is on display. Minimalism, monochrome, and lettrism all appear in Tölg-Molnár’s consistent artistic career.
János Schneller, art historian