The exhibition explores the major creative stages of Agnes Denes’ life through a series of prints, drawings, photo-documentaries and videos. Born in Budapest in 1931, Agnes Denes moved with her family to Sweden and then to the United States in the 1950s. She tried her hand at writing poetry as a young woman, then turned to the visual arts, but soon found the traditional visual arts constricting.
She began a systematic experimentation in which he explored the interrelationship between science and art, using and reinterpreting the results of mathematics, philosophy, psychology and linguistics in original and inventive ways.
In the 1960s, she began his analytical series Philosophy Drawings, followed in the 1970s by major series such as Pyramids and Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space – map projections, which depicted the mysteries and paradoxes of human knowledge in carefully crafted drawings and graphics.
She was one of the first to incorporate an ecological approach into his art, combining various media and tendencies. Many trends in contemporary environmental and socially conscious art would be unthinkable without Agnes Denes’ initiatives.
Her conceptual art is rooted in land art and environment, as well as poetry and philosophy, graphics and installation art. Denes coined the term eco-logic in the early 1970s, which refers to the duality of ecology and logic, the two pillars of his complex artistic thinking.
The exhibition attempts to survey all the major groups and periods of the artist’s oeuvre through a selection of his drawings, prints and photographs. The exhibition includes photographic documentation of the artist’s emblematic ecological works, including the 1982 action “Wheatfield – confrontation“, in which she sowed and harvested a 0.8 hectare landfill site in the south end of Manhattan, near the then still standing Twin Towers, with the help of volunteers.
The intrusion of the landscape into New York’s metropolis has raised economic and social concerns alongside environmental issues. Equally groundbreaking was the community project Tree Hill – Living Time Capsule (1982-1996), when a mathematical formula was used to plant eleven thousand trees in Finland by the same number of people. The trees of this ‘mathematical forest’, in the artist’s words, ‘must survive the present and, by surviving, transplant our ideas into an unknown future’.