For the first time, a small selection of Ákos Birkás’s oeuvre, which ended in 2018, is on display at the Vintage Gallery, selected by the Ákos Birkás Art Foundation. In the future, the Foundation and the gallery aim to explore and promote the oeuvre of Ákos Birkás at home and abroad, and this exhibition is a part of this process.
The theme may seem obvious to an audience familiar with the oeuvre of Ákos Birkás: the exhibition is organised around the motifs of the face and the head, and the genre of portraiture. In total, ten works of varying techniques and sizes provide an overview of Birkás’s oeuvre from the late 1960s to the 2010s, highlighting the connections and changes between the images.
Of course, we can only shed light on the artistic questions and experiments that the artist developed from picture to picture, through large-scale series, but the works shown here are significant in themselves, representing a particular period, theme or type of image. Throughout his career of more than five decades, Ákos Birkás’s interest in the fundamental questions of painting, including portraiture and the representation of people, has remained unchanged, and his works reveal the broad intellectual horizon and reflective attitude with which he has from time to time questioned the role and social significance of the artist and art.
Krisztina Szipőcs