acb Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Áron Gábor (b. 1954), showcasing a selection of paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through this exhibition, visitors can once again gain insight into one of the most exciting and dynamic periods in Hungarian art history, the years leading up to the political changes. As one of the youngest and most dynamic representatives of the radical new eclecticism and Hungarian postmodernism of the 1980s, Áron Gábor not only created paintings and graphic works throughout the decade but also produced numerous exciting and interconnected installations, performances, and video artworks.
Accordingly, the exhibition opens with documentation of his 1990 performance Poll, in which the artist’s painting and object-environment take on an almost central role alongside human figures. The other opening piece of Rewound is the exhibition’s earliest work, Ellinor and Darling at the Excelsior (1983–84), which, compared to later pieces, has a more linear and drawn-out quality. With its symbolic eclecticism, it evokes the Victorian era in a somewhat fairy-tale-like manner.
The exhibiting artist graduated from the painting department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1981 in the class of Ignác Kokas, then continued his studies in 1982–83 in the master’s program for mural painting led by Károly Klimó. A pivotal moment in Gábor’s artistic career was his involvement in the Indigo Group, a collective associated with Miklós Erdély, as early as the late 1970s. His painting practice reached its full development during the 1980s within the artistic framework of new sensibility, a concept defined by art historian Loránd Hegyi.
In acb Gallery’s historical retrospective, the spotlight is on Áron Gábor’s expressive figurative paintings, which are deeply rooted in the zeitgeist of the 1980s. His works are often characterized by a private mythological symbolism, with one recurring figure being the cat—an iconic embodiment of freedom that, in some paintings, takes on a nearly demonic, jackal-like form. Equally significant is the motif of the red human figure embraced by a vortex, which serves as a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as well as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Puppets also play an important role in Gábor’s paintings, their symbolic meaning shaped by their resemblance to human figures.
One of the exhibition’s standout works is the triptych Twisted III, in which, alongside the aforementioned motifs, the artist’s self-reflective figure appears in a yellow patterned jacket, captured in the act of creation.
Gábor’s paintings from 1983 to 1991, presented in the exhibition, are primarily characterized by layering, mirroring, and an unbound use of mediums and motifs—elements that visitors will find in abundance in the gallery space. His intricate yet spontaneous symbolic vocabulary also contains biblical references, echoed in the recurring vortex motif. The artist frequently employs diagonal, triangular compositions, shaping them with expressive, linear brushwork and infusing them with the dynamic movement of spirals and vortices. During this period, the collage-like patterned decorativity of his paintings was just as important to him—an essential aspect of 1980s painting—as the distinctive color palette of the era, dominated by shades of pink, purple, and green.