‘Ogni dipintore dipinge se’ – ‘Every painter paints himself’ – is the sentence quoted by Daniel Arasse in the afterword to his celebrated book The Artist in the Work. Beyond the fact that this phrase was attributed to a number of highly influential figures (including Brunelleschi, Savonarola and Leonardo da Vinci) in the fifteenth century, it captures something essential: ‘there was a sense in the air at the time that a work of art inevitably resembles its maker, whom we “recognise” in it’. Interestingly, unlike writers, the fine artists of the period were not enthusiastic about this proposition. Arasse explains this as follows: ‘If painters accepted that “every painter paints him self”, they would also have to acknowledge that something artisanal enters into their art, and that they are incapable of giving evidence of sprezzatura, that elegant nonchalance thanks to which “art conceals art” and which was starting to become a socially established model of artistic conduct at that time. Furthermore: ‘[…] manifest in this formulation is one of the fundamental stakes of the Renaissance into focus, namely whether it could be made generally accepted that the “personnalité artistique” plays a crucial role in creating and repre senting forms, and in their history.’ Arasse’s argument will not be discussed in detail here, but a particular line of interpretation will be followed as a conceptual point of departure for the present exhibi tion. In his collection of essays, Arasse was interested in ‘how the artist, the person who painted the work, emerges in the subject of that work’.
Painting centred on the ‘artistic personality’ reached its culmi nation with Kant’s aesthetics of genius and the Romantic period. It was precisely then, almost two hundred years ago, that this concep tion of artistic authorship entered a crisis, apparently as a result of a technological discovery – the invention of photography – and since then the question of whether painting remains a legitimate artistic practice has emerged again and again. From the perspective of the present, it is clear that such debates have invariably flared up as part of larger paradigm shifts and crises affecting society as a whole. It is also clear that Rodchenko’s radical reductionism in his 1921 triptych The Death of Painting, which ‘depicted’ the three primary colours, did not bring painting to an end but, together with the work of other avant-garde artists, gave new impulses to it. Nor do we read the critic Douglas Crimp’s paradigmatic 1981 essay The End of Painting as a prophecy announcing the end of painting, but rather as a critique of society and capitalism that approached the question of painting in terms of it becoming a form of luxury commodity.
Aesthetic and philosophical self-reflection has always been an integral part of painting, as has its engagement with society; thus, paradoxically, painting has emerged from debates of this kind strengthened rather than weakened. On this basis, we may be justi fied in asking: why do painters paint today? This question, among others, is also explored by this year’s Fresh exhibition, now being held for the seventh time.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the parallel solo exhibitions is that they enable visitors, as they move from room to room, to en counter an ever-changing range of painterly forms, methods and sys tems of thought. The artists featured in previous exhibitions were active in different genres: besides painting, graphic art, sculpture and installation art, we were able to present works belonging to numer ous other genres in the rooms dedicated to individual artists. Then, in 2023, we presented a selection devoted specifically to sculpture, which provided new insights into the interaction between works be longing to a single artistic genre.
Following this concept, this year’s selection is devoted to paint ing. As in 2023, the Kunsthalle Budapest’s curators have selected six painters, so that visitors can gain a more in-depth understanding of this particular field of artistic practice. While these exhibitions are not retrospectives, the selected works offer an insight into the art ists’ mature oeuvres. According to their modes of representation, the displayed works include figurative and abstract paintings; sty listically, they may be painterly or drawing-like, while their subjects may equally be mythological or drawn from everyday life. In other words, regardless of the genre, the artistic personalities are part of the works through their styles, concepts, ways of thinking and work ing methods.
Réka Kaszás: Forms of absence
Réka Kaszás makes her panel paintings using traditional painting techniques. Landscape painting occupies a prominent place in her art; however, she does not seek to visually reproduce the landscape but rather to create a new pictorial system in which she can rearrange directly observed reality. She conducted research in several directions beyond the traditional pictorial representation of the landscape in order to find contemporary approaches to the genre. Her creative method is characterised by the meeting of observation-based analytical painting and an attitude of reduction and abstraction. She has been thinking in systems since the beginning of her career; therefore, in her earlier series, she always examined nature and the man-made, built environment in their mutual interaction. In the series Variety, she represented man-made constructions as abstract forms, juxtaposing them with organic forms taken from nature, such as clouds. In the series Dissolved Reality, she allowed the paint to run and constructed or, in some cases, deconstructed the image using the material’s free movement. Her aim is not to replicate observed reality accurately but much rather to experience the landscape and to observe the moment and the location; as she put it, in this way ‘the landscape also passes through me’ during the creative process.
Gábor Király: On blue’s horizon
Gábor Király’s most recent exhibition captures the moment of a creative turning point that is open and leads towards the unknown. A point at which the artist re places his earlier, raw expressivist style by a more disciplined, lyrical and meditative visual language.
Kata Könyv: Image bodies
A significant innovation in Kata Könyv’s career is her creation of soft pictures. Besides her earlier, classical oil-on-canvas works, she makes tactile, relief-like works with the forms and visual language of ancient, Renaissance and Baroque sculpture serving as their point of departure; thus, the expanded dimensions of her homage soft pictures inspired by Michelangelo and Bernini can be understood as distinctive paraphrases. She transforms the formal language of sculpture into two dimensions, while retaining its spatiality. She applies microplush to a support made of furniture board and sponge, which she then paints in oils. Her surfaces project beyond the plane and create trompe l’œil effects, giving the works a dual perspective; she is able to evoke a fully three-dimensional sense of space through her use of colour, tonalities and shadows. The expanded dimensions of the soft pictures make it possible to touch them physically, experiencing their texture and depth as though we were genuinely in touching distance, touching human flesh and skin. These sensations are associated with the feminine principle, evoking warmth and familiarity. The works mounted on the wall play a prominent role: they eliminate the conventional observer’s position and break down the distance between the image and the viewer, allowing them to become much more a part of the visual, indeed haptic, experience and recognise themselves and the world around them while engaging with the picture.
Tamás Menyhárt: Angels, living and dead
Tamás Menyhárt’s artistic style had fully matured by the mid-2010s. He had produced some outstanding works in his earlier periods, but it was by this time that the unmistakable features of his painting had become firmly established. The reduced palette, charcoal reminiscent of cave paintings, the red of blood, the brilliance of the gold and silver known from the Trecento and from icons, the dynamic graphic framework and paint dripping, restless gestural movements and assemblages of found objects have been characteristics of his paintings ever since. The abstraction of his earlier work dwindled and his subject matter is now almost always figurative; in addition to his expressionist drawings of faces and hands, the recurring symbols that make up Menyus’s principal arsenal are skulls, crosses, stigmata, halos, bleeding hearts, wounding knives, pointing fingers, devil’s horns, angel wings, rays of light and stardust. The Mantra for Dead Friends, which he wrote, also doggedly reappears in his paintings again and again as a background element.
Ákos Bánki: Sequences
Bánki’s works displayed here were made in 2023 and mostly in the months preceding the current exhibition: they represent the stations of a consistent exploration, seen by the artist as necessary, which he has been pursuing for twenty years now. He thinks in terms of sequences and series, with each cycle, at times including subtle overlaps, springing from and leading to an experience that we need to live through in as many forms as possible to be able to feel our struggle with the elements of existence bearing fruit from time to time. Bánki effortlessly maps out various perspectives, processes changes and abstracts all these, partly because of the influence of Sándor Molnár, Orsolya Drozdik and Tamás Lossonczy, and partly thanks to the worldview of artists he only encountered through their works, such as Sándor Weöres, Béla Hamvas and, of course, Tibor Hajas, Mark Rothko, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Arnulf Rainer, and the American giant female painters: Joan Mitchell and Pat Steir.
Kati Verebics. Nautilus dream (between layers)
In addition to collage, the method most frequently employed by Kati Verebics is the transfer technique, which she has been using since 2015. It is an image transfer method that allows a photograph to be incorporated into the work and then become an integral part of the picture. As a result, drawing, painting and photography appear on the canvas simultaneously. The greatest value of this method lies in how it introduces an additional, translucent layer into the picture made using classical techniques, thus giving the work a deeper, multidimensional space.