Attila Szűcs
Planking
The Erika Deák Gallery delighted to announce its next exhibition by renowned Hungarian painter, Attila Szűcs.
On his recent exhibition, entitled Planking, we can survey the last two years of Szűcs’s working period, during which he’s been researching the worldwide phenomenon of planking. The opening of the exhibit will be unconventional; Balázs Karafiáth is going to present his speech through the ether of the virtual world, straight from San Francisco.
Szűcs made his first planking painting in 1997. It’s a self-portrait, on which he lies in a rigid posture between two couches. In the 2000s, he painted several works which now can be easily inserted into the line of the planking series. In 2011, he met the world-wide phenomenon of planking on the internet.
The planking man provokes and confuses his viewer with his extreme behavior. Laying face down anywhere on the street or in the most unexpected places, having his hands pressed straight to his body while remaining motionless, he is deliberately isolating himself from the spontaneous audience. As if with a Dadaist gesture, he rejects all interpretations and escapes into a peculiar passive resistance. He withdraws himself from life around by becoming part of his immediate environment – it is mimicry at its highest. Through looking at this concentrated inactivity, the viewer finds himself at not-finding the meaning of the whole act, and understands that this is an aimless game of no sense, which has neither a purpose nor a consequence.
Ever since the beginning of his career, Szűcs has been examining our relationship with our surrounding visual torrent, and by doing that, he’s been able to paint a rather prompt image of the times we live in. By looking deep into the phenomenon of planking, he examined themes of „illusion and representation” or „meaning and non-meaning”- important subjects in his oeuvre. Uniquely, Szűcs produced a life-size aluminum sculpture for this exhibition, a woman planking on a couch is
going to be the highlights of his planking project.
Attila Szűcs was born in 1967, Miskolc. He lives and works in Budapest. He had numerous exhibitions around the world, and his works can be found in the most important Hungarian and international collections.
11. 23. 2012 - 01. 05. 2013