Péter Szarka’s exhibition entitled drum_lesson_1 showcases the artist’s latest objects and panel paintings. The presented material displays visual and textual traces of a near-apocalypse situation. The artist has created, and exhibits, object components of an intentionally undefined dystopic vision – the imprint of an imagined society that is halfway between a post-industrial and tribal culture.

Szarka, in his use of materials, makes a reference to his own works from the ‘90s, which bore the marks of musical subcultures and their effects. His montage-like panel paintings were sometimes evocative of Arte Povera, while, at other times, employed the then-latest digital technologies. The texts and text fragments that appeared on them, which were only known to those familiar with musical subcultures, rendered these works enigmatic – to be solved by the uninitiated. The works displayed at the present exhibition can also be characterized as enigmatic. As a significant difference, however, the featured visual and textual components do not comprise the elements of a special code system; their combined meaning allows the viewer to piece together, albeit only in fragments, the artist’s fiction.