[artinfo] Time Out Budapest (January 2012)

[art]

TIME OUT BUDAPEST ART HIGHLIGHTS

Feature: Dániel Halász (Lumen Galéria)
‘The largest font is reserved for the warning that all students that leave Hungary will have to pay back the cost of their higher education, with the only ones likely to slip through the net being those ‘who move to the jungle.’ In the light of this quotation, a pile of boarding cards for an Asian airline and a geo-politically outdated rotating globe start to make sense as reference points for a daydreamed journey to the end of beyond, while the panoramic scenes appear in a new light as visions of uninhabited fantasy forests, places out of reach of government tax collectors and barmy political decrees.’

Review: Ilona Nemeth (Ernst Museum) ***
Prominent Bratislava-based artist of Hungarian ethnicity, Ilona Németh, has used a prestigious solo slot at the Ernst Museum to highlight the moral minefield she faced in preparing what was meant to be a major exhibition. Giving up late in the day on plans to transform the Ernst Museum into a large scale installation dealing with the life and times of philosopher Agnes Heller, she opted instead to project interviews with herself in which she airs the ‘dilemmas’ that ultimately led her to forsake her original exhibition plans. ‘

Review: Tibor Szalai and László Vincze (Vintage Galéria) ****
 ‘The series of rare black and white photographs show the artists engaged in weird performances in the dark, with the white lines streaking energetically across the prints created using candle light in a ‘pre’-postproduction era. The air of mystery invoked by these dark photographs is heightened by the awareness that what we’re dealing with here is a lost and somewhat heroic era, in which cultural experimentation thrived on the margins of the socialist system.’ 

Review: András Ernst (Molnár Galéria) ****
‘These canvases make no apology for creating a soothing, meditative effect, filling the white cube atmosphere of the gallery with a Zen-like calm.  There is repetition of patterns derived from natural forms, from falling leaves to pools of rain, but transformed through the use of a generous palette of warm and almost metallic colours.’

Review: Milorad Krstić (Műcsarnok) **
‘Through sketches populated with cartoon-style dissections and decapitations, DAT appears to be about creating distant echoes of the classical avant-garde and mixing the ideological symbolism of Fascism and Communism – perhaps as a nod to the famous Ljubljana-based group (with another German name) Neu Slovenische Kunst (NSK). The question raised by this show is why the Műcsarnok has given over its space to soft core post-modernism and if we’re meant to understand this work as contemporary rather than historical, what image does it present of contemporary art?’

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

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