For thousands of years, humanity has been searching the skies for scientific and religious reasons, establishing fundamental links between macrocosmic phenomena and our microcosm. This contemplation has dominated András Lengyel’s approach to life and work. He has been collecting clouds since the seventies, and in his own way he creates a link between the tangible and the intangible by means of visual art.
The exhibition … Everything Is up in the Clouds … is an overview of András Lengyel’s rich oeuvre, spanning his entire career, yet it is not a retrospective, as new works are still being created today. Through thematic blocks, it traces the process by which the oeuvre, which grew out of Fluxus and conceptual art, has been developed in postmodernism through action, photo-based reproduced graphics, Mail Art and paintings.
Lengyel belongs to the second generation of Hungarian neo-avant-garde and was a founding member of the Rózsa Circle, which played a major role in the art of the 1970s. He began his studies at the College of Fine Arts as a painter, and from his third year he continued his studies at the Graphic Arts Department. His clouds migrated into the field of reproduced graphics, and then, along with other important motifs such as the triangle, the book, the Cloud Museum, found their place in photographs, actions or installations, only to reappear in paintings in his later years.
These symbols of human knowledge can invite their viewers to become part of a tradition of thousands of years through which man has searched for his place in the universe. András Lengyel’s artworks are intended to facilitate this immersion in their own playful and witty way: in his case, everything can be art, even a piece of tile and a neon tube, if it helps us contemplate as an object of meditation. If we go through the stages of cognition, at the end of our journey we may find ourselves dissolved in the universe around us.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue including studies by art historians.