[artinfo] Time Out Budapest (Art Reviews) December 2011

[art]

Main Feature: Hungarian Art in the Balance
‘As 2011 draws to an end, it’s hard to resist pondering the highs and lows of the last year and wondering what the future holds in store for the local art scene. Politics and economics loom large, with nothing certain or sacred anymore in the life of art institutions, but beneath the surface of the battle for survival, the rumble of new creative energy can be felt. It’s a well-worn cliché that art flourishes in a crisis and any shake up of the system also provides opportunities for new ideas, people and spaces to rise to the occasion.’
http://www.translocal.org/reviewsindex.html

Review: Roland Farkas, Draw Your Money, Studio Galéria
‘Roland Farkas’s exhibition in Studio Galéria is both utterly of the moment in its exploration of the ephemeral qualities of money and compelling for its concise and lucid approach to the activity announced by the exhibition title. There is nothing unnecessary or overdone in this show made up of two complimentary works that are the result of a transparent process of collaboration, performance and engagement with the tangible reality of the cash economy.’

Review: Little Warsaw, The Battle of Inner Truth, Trafó Galéria
‘Little Warsaw’s creative method, as art historian József Melyi opined in his speech for the opening of their parallel show at the Kisterem Gallery, is as closely a kept secret ‘as the recipe for Coca Cola.’ All the elements of a Little Warsaw artwork are indeed present in their latest solo exhibition at the Trafó Gallery, from the use and redeployment of borrowed materials, to the cultivation of a studied ambiguity that gives the work the appearance of conceptual depth.’

Review: Man, Paul Horn, Why Always Me?, Knoll Galéria
‘Handing us a plan of the exhibited works, Knoll Gallery curator Erzsébet Pilinger’s ominous words of warning were: ‘it’s complicated.’ Actually, this well-conceived and skilfully executed show is nothing of the kind. Whether you take the work as a post-modern satire on the multiplicity of ideological forms, or read it as a more direct commentary on the correlation between the medium and the message, this Paul Horn exhibition turns out to be surprisingly accessible and viewer friendly.’

Review: Rita Ackermann, Ludwig Museum
‘Rita Ackermann left Budapest in the early 90s and moved to New York in order to experience the cross currents and frenetic energy of the international art scene at its very source.  She has lived and worked there ever since, winning significant recognition on the American exhibition circuit, while audiences in Hungary have only been able to follow her career from a distance. This important solo show at the Ludwig Museum, one of their on-going series of exhibitions devoted to artists of Hungarian origin who are more prominent abroad than at home, is a rich mid-career retrospective of an artist whose work oozes with New York attitude.’

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Please send exhibition listings by the 20th of the preceding month.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Art Editors
Time Out Budapest
art at timeoutbudapest.hu