Not only is the first solo exhibition of Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri (1997) the artist’s debut at acb, but is also the inaugural show of the gallery’s new exhibition space called acb Plus on the corner of Király and Eötvös Street. Having graduated this year in the class of Eszter Radák at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri will be showing his monumental series of canvases made in 2021 for the first time in Hungary.

The main focus of the artist’s selection entitled Totem is on paintings dominated by vivid, vibrantly coloured bull and snake figures, familiar to viewers from the Old Testament or even from archaic, ancient myths. Deeply embedded in our culture, the universal animal symbols are given a new interpretative framework and become personified in the painter’s private mythology, filtered, above all, through the pop culture of our time. As if with this series, the artist could extract the tragic and dramatic aspects of myths from his paintings and fill their dramaturgically definite place with the playfulness of animal tales. Lakatos Gelléri’s portrayal of his typical characters combines the aesthetics of the 1990s with post-internet painting.

In fact, it was with this series that the artist created his trademark figurative pictorial language, which is yet another reason to present this specific cycle. For the at once symbolic and expressive visual character that most people identify with the young painter’s art has become crystallised in the paintings he is exhibitingnow. From an art-historical point of view, Lakatos Gelléri’s refreshingly eclectic painting can also be linked to the wave of postmodern art in the 1980s. From a technical aspect, the young painter’s canvases are unified by the surfaces applied with spray paint, brush and ink. The artist moves with amazing ease between the mostly spray-painted, loosely figurative compositions and the floral backgrounds that tend towards gestural abstraction. His painting brings to a common platform the spirit of the times so evident in his works and a self-consciously arsenal of instinctive brushstrokes, which is even more radical, free and relaxed in his most recent paintings made since 2021.

 In 2022, Barnabás Lakatos Gelléri participated in acb Gallery’s group exhibition New Wave and Easttopics’ Global Crises, local relationships project, and was a special guest at the Art Cologne art fair in 2021 with the Queer Budapest platform, also featured in Calvert Journal. His most recent solo exhibition took place at the Nyolcésfél Inspiration Zone and Creative Space in the summer of 2022.