Menyhért Szabó presents his latest sculptures in a solo exhibition at Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art. Szabó, a member of a new generation that began in the late 2010s, has dismantled and rebuilt the introspective, humanist world of classical face and nude portraiture using crumpled rubber shells and industrial raw materials.
In his reliefs now on show, he evokes the fragmentary beauty of the Parthenon reliefs in the British Museum’s Frieze of the Parthenon using his signature crumpled silicone torsos. His separate sculptures rewrite the compositional structure of the futurist icon Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 work The Unified Forms of Spatial Continuity. Whereas avant-garde sculpture swells with the dizzying dynamism of the rushing man, Szabo’s is a symbolic X-shape, a solid sculpture built up from fragmented elements.
“The works,” says the artist, “have a solid effect, but are fragmented in structure or composition. They contradict Boccioni’s continuity; in my work, movement is frozen in space, in the X-form. The pieces are not united, they break down into separate forms. The alien elements, the scanned crocodile skin or the strange spatial elements only half-fuse with the body. I deconstruct classical elements in my work, but however fragmented, however falling apart, it retains its solidity, its fragmented forms of static solidity. As a cork image of a world in turmoil.”