Through the works of three important artists of the change of regime – István Bodóczky, János Szirtes and Zoltán Tölg-Molnár – the exhibition Travellers highlights the still incompletely processed achievements of Hungarian postmodern tactile, gestural, material-centric and abstract painting, providing an insight into the art of the first post-war generation of the 1990s. In addition to their autonomous creative work, all three of them have an important pedagogical practice, and their students include many artists who have since become important figures in their own right.
“We have nowhere to go, so we travel”, wrote and drew István Bodóczky (1943-2020) on his work Scribbles 5, a work of 1996, structured with curved bamboo fibres and floating like a cloud in the gallery space. The work metaphorically summarises the paradox of the Hungarian cultural opening of the 1990s: the infinite possibility of freedom and its oppressive burden, which also gives rise to anxiety, while also pointing to the importance of the “road”, of being on the road. In the body of the painting, with its beautifully drawn, curved lines, nothing stops the dynamic freedom of the form, which is delimited by curves, and the sequenced spatial elements of the constructed internal structure are interconnected. In Bodóczky’s works, the drawn line and the stain flow into each other, the written text is transformed into a drawing. For the painter, line and stain are equivalent pictorial elements, while the use of colour – or lack of it – is also a conscious choice.
In the mid-nineties, Zoltán Tölg-Molnár and János Szirtes typically did not use colour in their art, or used it less. János Szirtes (*1954) reacted to the post-modern neo-expressionism of the 1980s and created a characterful layer-painting deconstructed on gesture, colour, movement and time. Motifs of archaic cultures are layered in his canvases with pure colours rooted in the modern, as preserves of time. The artist, who is also active as a performer, is aware of the importance of time, and thus incorporates volatile smoke into his use of tools and his use of traces, whose tactile presence gives his painting an individual character. His compositions in the exhibition range from paintings born from the interplay of organic and geometric lines and blotches, or from his gesture-expressive chalk-print omissions to geometric form-building alongside a considered ruler.
Time also plays a key role in the informal, monochrome material painting of Zoltán Tölg-Molnár (1944-2024). He builds his works from paper masses laid on a grid, and creates his moulded works using various signs, forms, archaic motifs and treasures (Christian and Roman) of cultural and historical significance. His performative work, like his free associative works, is open in time and space, with its own malleability. This temporality applied to Tölg-Molnár’s works and his working method from the mid-nineties until his death in 2024: he returned to his works. This is how he made Wounded Tablet IV, begun in the 1990s and completed in 2002, and the SPQR series, which took shape from his active period at the Rome Academy in 1996 until 2020.
While the performative presence in István Bodóczky’s works was usually the so-called “flying” in the open air after the activity in the studio (his constructions were usually released into the wind like kites), Zoltán Tölg-Molnár and János Szirtes were characterised by the presence of their own bodies or their presence with minimal use of tools in the construction of an object. The gesture of leaving a trace played an important role in the creation of all three of their works.