Péter Nádas is one of the most outstanding artists of Hungarian art. His literary works have been translated into almost all the languages of the world, and it is difficult to list the many national and international awards he has received during his long career. The exhibition is also a huge celebration of Péter Nádas’ 80th birthday on 14 October, and is part of a series of events celebrating the writer in many parts of the country.
Péter Nádas’ photographic work dates back to the 1960s. Originally trained as a photographer, he worked as a press photographer for ‘Nők Lapja’, among other publications, but in the 1970s he retired from formal photography and continued to make photographs in dialogue with his literary work. He took hundreds of photographs of the pear tree in the garden of his house in Gombosszeg, a series of which illustrated his book ‘Own Death’.
Nádas continued with analogue photography until 1999, but after the publication of his book of selected photographs ‘All the Light’ he abandoned it to the extent that he dismantled his laboratory and donated his images to the Kunsthaus in Zug and the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest. Since the early 2000s, he has been taking his pictures digitally, mainly with an iPhone.
Péter Nádas has taken all of his now exhibited photographs with his own smartphone. The focus of his interest is the investigation of the potential for error in digital image making, and within this, the thematisation of the duality of light and darkness. His series are essentially still lives and self-portraits. Each of his photographs is an attempt to capture light and its absence. His images testify to a deep understanding of the inevitability of personal and universal change.
Most of the material in the exhibition was created while writing his recently published novel ‘Dreadful Stories’. Nádas writes of the creative process ‘In The Colours of Darkness’, which is published in full in the book accompanying the exhibition: ‘Playing with natural human weaknesses has become all the more important for me as I am currently writing horror stories, and the more horrible the story is, that is to say, the more it is nurtured by the magical and archaic layer of human consciousness, the more I need clarity and purity of vision to write it up.’