Nagyházi Contemporary and TAW Gallery are presenting Endre Kecső’s latest exhibition in a joint collaboration.
The title of the exhibition—Hybrid—refers not merely to formal diversity, but to a fundamental condition that serves as one of the key organizing principles of Kecső’s painting: the constant intermingling of various systems, qualities, and perspectives, and the continuous blending of layers and qualities.
On Kecső’s monumental canvases, the deities and heroes of the mythologies of various cultural circles come to life. For him, however, myth is never an illustration, a backdrop, or a mere reference, but rather a narrative space where humanity’s fundamental questions converge — and where the artist articulates his own dilemmas regarding his humanity. In his painting, the “great stories” do not veer toward pathos, but quite the opposite: they lead back to individual experience.
His heroes are not triumphant, unquestionable figures, but fallible, fragmented, and distorted beings. They do not stand before us in heroic poses, but appear in twisted, tilted, and sometimes contorted postures, as if frozen in a state of unstable equilibrium. For him, the order of the world is a structure that is constantly shifting and being rewritten: the spiritual and the physical, the sublime and the mundane, the archaic and the contemporary slide into one another — keeping each other in a state of constant tension.
This hybridity is not only thematic but also pictorial in nature. The compositions bring together an archaic repertoire of motifs, modernist reduction, and narrative fragments. The monumental forms simultaneously embody plasticity and ornamentation; the figures strain against the picture’s boundaries, as if captured at the moment of greatest energy. At the same time, alongside mythical gravity, a distinctly relaxed, at times explicitly pop-inspired, humor-laced layer also emerges. Speech bubbles, ironic shifts, and painterly lightness break the pathos.
Kecső’s oeuvre is not structured linearly, but rather organized like a spider’s web. It circulates around various questions: his themes converge toward the same point of density, as if approaching a center, yet always from a different perspective, through different mythological figures and different painterly solutions. The essential question remains the same time and again: what is a human being, and how can they be understood in their own borderline situations?
The exhibition taking place at the two venues is a kind of partial history: not a closed summary, but a cross-section. It is composed of fragments, problem statements, and series that are interconnected, react to one another, intensify one another, or even distance themselves from one another. While it would be easy to simplify things by saying that Endre Kecső “paints myths,” the exhibition highlights precisely the limitations of this statement. Behind the mythological starting point lies a complex painterly and formal thought process — a mode of operation that cannot be confined to a single category.
Thus, “Hybrid” refers not only to the formal language of the images, but also to the perspective in which identity, narrative, and form are always in a state of transition, always layered, and always intertwined.