In selecting the material, our primary consideration was that the exhibition should adequately reflect Alain Fleischer’s unique creative method in a way that is clearly perceptible to the audience. Fleischer’s photographs do not fall into the category of classical photography; they are not the result of intuition or impressions, but rather the products of ideas and experiments. He views photography not as a finished work, but as raw material to be shaped and refined. The artist is always preoccupied with some emerging question or theoretical problem, to which he seeks answers through experimental realization.
For the audience, the visual spectacle can be an experience in and of itself, but one of the curatorial goals is to demonstrate that, beyond the conventional and the familiar, other kinds of visual approaches also exist. At the same time, we consider it necessary to explore the creative process; to facilitate this understanding, each series on display is accompanied by a brief description of the artist’s working method.
Fleischer has had a long and prolific creative career. Despite the limited exhibition space available, we have strived to present as many series as possible from as many periods of this vast body of work as we could, along with the most representative pieces from each.
Works created from the 1960s to the present day allow the exhibition to showcase a wide range of creative approaches. Certain series, such as MIRROR/ FIÓK or KERETEK ES TÜKÖRTÁRGYAK, demonstrate that ideas stemming from a rich imagination could be realized even in the pre–artificial–intelligence era; it’s just that the path to achieving them required more time, ingenuity, and, above all, greater depth of thought. The use of reflection and movement can be found in the 1981–1982 MIRROR/DRAWER series, in which the resulting image depicts the moment the drawers are opened against a mirrored background. The result of lengthy preparatory work, staging, and a complex process depicts movement and reflections that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
In FRAMES AND MIRRORED OBJECTS, he explores the interpretation of the concept of “boundary.” The boundary line separating the photograph from the external field—the frame—and, on the other hand, the mirror’s reflection carry the viewer into a third space: the space of the person viewing the object. This series is one of several that explore the relationship between space, what lies outside of space, and the opposite.
As if to symbolize a step forward, the selection includes several later works from the *I AM ONLY ONE IMAGE* series, in which the artist transforms the image into sound and then back into an image. These works reveal that Fleischer does not exclude the use of modern technologies from his creative practice. The works also serve as examples of how this experimental artist, always in search of something new, boldly employs new tools and keeps pace with the developments of his own era.