Péter Szarka
About the artist
The artistic interests of Péter Szarka (1964) ever since he became a founding member of the Budapest based artist collective Újlak Group at the end of the 1980s, has been defined by the constant reinvention of painterly imagination, extreme irony, admiration of new musical subcultures and a unique play with trash aesthetics, which always kept his practice fresh and trailblazing. Szarka turned towards a digital approach on art by the the end of the 1990s. He started to create artworks with 3d modelling softwares long before the global boom of post-internet art. He stated in an interview: „The things I am dealing with right now are in a no man’s land.” It took almost two decades for the art scene to catch up with Szarka, and his ideas about seriality, impersonality and his admiration for the painterly qualities of glitches and rendering errors. It is important to point out that technology has never been the centre of Péter Szarka’s aesthetic interest. Although the works of the artist may show traces of the electronic ecstasy of the 90s, Szarka had never endeavoured to create visual prefigurations of a utopian future. But on the contrary he always presents visions of a future which is already anachronistic. Szarka used technology for his prints as a pure tool to display dystopian fragments and to highlight the evanescence of human civilisation.
