“The Continuous Past” undertakes the most comprehensive presentation to date of Csaba Nemes’s three-and-a-half-decade-long career, spanning from his neo-conceptual works of the early 1990s to the abstract paintings created in recent years. Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition surveys the artist’s oeuvre along four thematic threads that run through his entire career, drawing on unexpected parallels and contrasts between works from different periods, as well as conceptual strategies and recurring motifs that emerge over the span of several decades.
A defining feature of Csaba Nemes’s art is his critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural processes of the present moment, and his search for the corresponding contemporary artistic form, drawing on drawing, and photography as his primary media, while also employing a wide variety of tools ranging from animated film and linocuts to official contracts and some collaborative Lego sculptures. Looking back, these reflections on the present trace a historical arc, from the visual and social transformations of the years of the regime change that coincided with the start of his career, through the events of October 2006, the 2008 Roma murders, and the refugee crisis, from The Living Memorial launched in 2014 to the 2020 blockade of the University of Theatre and Film Arts.
At the same time, Nemes’s cultural diagnoses repeatedly uncover the “continuous past” in the present-day periods following the transition: inherited historical traumas, grievances, and life strategies; the frozen relations of economic, ethnic, and ideological conflicts; social and cultural patterns that seem unbreakable or return in altered forms; endless struggles over the politics of memory; and the rise of conservative movements built on romantic fictions of the past.
The first section of the exhibition engages with these intertwined individual and collective, competing pasts, with parallel or intersecting timelines, and with the legacy of twentieth-century history — primarily socialism — which presents both constraints and opportunities; while the second guides visitors through the various directions of Nemes’s political and system-critical artistic program, which is consistent yet constantly experiments with new approaches. Among these, “socio-surrealism” — which transcends realistic representation — forms a separate section, reflecting on social reality through the tools of fiction and allegory, and on the intersections of past and present through montage and visual metaphor.
Finally, the closing section brings together various forms of abstraction — a current that has long flowed beneath the surface of his oeuvre — ranging from public art elements appropriated as “found abstract art” in the 1990s to “true” abstract paintings created in the 2020s.
The four sections are complemented by a Film Corridor, which presents a selection of Nemes’s video works spanning twenty years.