Art Rotterdam 2024

acb Gallery | New Art Section, booth 07

acb Gallery is delighted to announce its participation at Art Rotterdam. acb Gallery showcases a selection of the newest paintings of Hungarian artist Róbert Batykó which he created during a residency program in Haarlem in the autumn of 2023. Find us at booth 07 in the New Art Section of the art fair!

Batykó has oscillated his painting program between abstraction and figuration in the past 20 years, his newest works are the latest step in his career-long hybrid process. The new paintings continue the increasingly playfull figurativeness of Batykó’s works and these articulate a new shift after half-a- decade long digital inspirations. The artist already turned back to analogue, tangible materials and motifs in his works on paper, which already required a different compositional approach than the specially scraped paintings before. Thus the exhibited paintings mark the beginning of a new painterly logic and method of Batykó. The new works also reflect on the hypnotic visual power of consumer culture, which is the other main driving force behind the general aspect of Batykó’s art. The new pieces also reconnect to earlier series, and can be associated with Róbert Batykó’s 2015–2016 series of packaging materials and in some aspect recall the artist’s earlier paintings thematizing trash (2010-2014), which he painted during his earlier stays in the Netherlands.

Róbert Batykó (b. 1981) Hungarian painter, graduated in 2005 at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest and completed his DLA at the University of Pécs in 2021. He has received numerous recognitions for his work: in 2007 he won the Strabag Art Award and the Leopold Bloom Art Award in 2011. In the meantime he was granted the Derkovits Scolarship of the Hungarian State for young artists between 2008 and 2011. He lived and worked in the Netherlands for several years, recently he exhibited in 37pk and Horizonverticaal, Haarlem and earlier in Marian Cramer Projects in 2014. He also had numerous exhibitions in the past decades with Dutch artist Jurriaan Molenaar. Since 2007, besides acb Gallery, his works have been exhibited at every prominent Hungarian public institution from the Ludwig Museum, Budapest through the Hungarian National Gallery to the MODEM in Debrecen. These institutions all hold also numerous works from him in their permanent collection, the most recent public acquisition is of the Hungarian National Gallery in 2022. Batykó’s first mid-career retrospective exhibition in the monumental space of Paks Art Gallery closed in 2022 and a catalogue summarising his present career has been published in 2022 as well.

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