The first solo exhibition of Áron Gábor (1954) at acb Gallery presents a selection of his paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which offers a glimpse into one of the most impulsive periods of Hungarian art history in the years before the change of regime.
Áron Gábor, one of the youngest representatives of the radical new eclecticism of the 1980s, Hungarian postmodernism, created a number of exciting installations, performances and video works alongside his paintings and prints.
The exhibiting artist graduated from the painting class of Ignác Kokas at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1981, and in 1982-83 he also attended the master’s course in muralism under Károly Klimó. Áron Gábor’s involvement in the activities of the Indigo group, which was named after Miklós Erdély, was also crucial to his artistic career in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, his artistic work developed mainly within the artistic framework of Loránd Hegyi’s concept of ‘new sensibility’.
The historical retrospective of acb will focus on the expressive figurative paintings of Áron Gábor, inspired by the zeitgeist of the 1980s. In general, the exhibition’s paintings are characterised by a set of private mythological symbols, one of the central recurring figures of which is the cat, which can be interpreted as the iconic embodiment of freedom. Áron Gábor’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s are characterised by layering, mirroring, and the loose use of medium and motif, of which the viewer will find many examples in the exhibition.