TELLING STORIES
The exhibition focuses on contemporary alternatives of personal storytelling. It explores in various ways how an artwork can reflect on social and cultural phenomena today, whether personal stories are still relevant, and if there still is universal truth, knowledge, and understanding in a world of isolated bubbles and total dissonance.
The exhibited works seek answers to dilemmas that affect everyone today, such as the changing role of knowledge and culture, the total transformation of the reality we once knew, the climate anxiety, the overwhelming presence of mass media, and the possible role of art in today’s chaos, while also addressing timeless, personal questions of private existence. A significant portion of the works feature text— a sentence or a word that fits precisely into the fabric of the work. The text, a brief and clearly formulated message, functions not merely as a visual element, but as an essential part of the work’s meaning, offering viewers a guide to its interpretation.
Emese Benczúr (b. 1969, Budapest) reflects on social and cultural phenomena in her art, where the text, the material usage, and the other visual elements are closely interconnected. Her short, slogan-like statements represent specific attempts at interpreting the world. Her gigantic emboidery, Try to Stay Sensitive, made of paper confetti, reflects both on the monotonous reality of women’s labor, and also critically reimagines the tools of mass media to deliver its message. Mátyás Erményi (b. 1992, Budapest) builds his unique world on local visual memory, as well as the traditions of cartoons and pop culture. As a chronicler of collective and personal experiences, he blends different spaces and narratives in his works. In his painting Pangea Super Society, he juxtaposes the existence of a fictional continent with the painful reality of the loss of books—i.e., real knowledge—and the idealized past. Andi Gáldi Vinkó (b. 1982, Budapest) creates iconic photographs that serve as visual analogies of personal experiences with motherhood and femininity. Her works challenge taboos and invite conversation with a playful sense of humor, while tackling serious social and political issues. Her photo Fucking Lost reflects her own anxiety about the global climate crisis. Its raw language mirrors the personal and collective guilt directed toward future generations. Márton Gresa’s (b. 1993) paintings reflect on digital technology, pop and mass culture, and the current issues of consumer society, his works simultaneously evoke the world of traditional and digital images. His painting Fake Fact Hole confers a unique mean of social critique, investigating the mechanics of social media, the phenomenon of fake news, and the issue of constructed facts.
Péter Hecker (b. 1963, Budapest) is known for his distinct, charismatic art, which is both highly entertaining and uniquely humorous, yet also satirical and serious due to its social and political connotations. In many of his paintings, the central theme is art itself, as seen in I Love This Painting, where the artist declares his stance with an absurd, almost Dadaist gesture. Sándor Imreh (b. 1978, Debrecen) merges contemporary visual culture with the world of underground street art. His art captures the imprint of analytical observations on local cultural phenomena, urban existence, pop culture, and subcultures. In his socio-graphical, realistic drawings, intellectual humor and system critique meet. Looking at his drawing Buffer on Blaha, we almost relive the history of the well-known tram stop at Blaha Lujza tér. Anna Pakosz (b. 1991, Budapest) builds her art on intuition and reflects the current moments of her life. Her most recent stories are raw, impulsive, and expressive, where colors, shapes, and brief written thoughts represent the spontaneous displays of consciousness. In her painting Take 4, figurative and abstracts elements are overlayed, her lavish brushstrokes and emotional colors validate the legitimacy of subjective storytelling. Gábor Pap (b. 1991, Szentes) creates works that are manifestations of expressive self-expression. His large-scale paintings reflect on personal pain, self-destruction and his social condition with spontaneity and experimentation. On his unusually shaped canvases, unfinished stories, fragments of memories, signs, and forms are arranged next to each other, creating peculiar tension, as seen in Örökbarát. His painting, fragmented with squares and other geometric elements, could be interpreted as a profound testimony made up of multiple statements. Dániel Rohrböck (b. 1997, Budapest) creates thought provoking stories by mixing figurative and nonfigurative, graffiti, Japanese comic and avant-garde traditions and blending of various material qualities. A tension created by typographical fragments and visual elements evokes the rhythm of the never sleeping urban life. His painting Ripped NO 38 explores the phenomena of appearance and disappearance. This painting, like all the other works in the exhibition, offers viewers a spontaneous investigation into decoding missing or hidden details — an opportunity to create a new personal story.
The exhibition was organized with the collaboration of the acb gallery, the Einspach and Czapolai gallery, the Ani Molnár gallery and the VILTIN gallery.
For more information, please contact the gallery.
Opening: 2025, February 13, Thursday, 6 PM
On view: 2025. February 14. – March 7.
Open: Wednesday - Friday, 12 am - 6 pm, and by appointment