SPARK Art Fair Vienna 2024
| Venue: | Marx Halle, Karl-Farkas-Gasse 19, 1030 Vienna |
| Date: | Mar 15 – 17, 2024 |
Description
acb Gallery presents a carefully curated collection of paintings and drawings by Hungarian artist Mátyás Erményi, created within the past two years. The predominant motifs of these works—stoves, trees, chandeliers, still lifes, and looms—evoke memories and fragments from the material culture of Eastern Europe's recent past. The emotional connections woven into the works hinge on ambivalent dichotomies, where kindness, fear, cuteness, and melancholy coexist. These concepts form the foundation of socialization for numerous generations from the former Eastern Bloc.
From an aesthetic standpoint, Mátyás Erményi's paintings appear as enlarged doodles or fine-tip pen sketches. He achieves this distinctive quality using solely acrylic paint and a delicate paintbrush. Erményi seamlessly merges his previously comics-style figures with instinctively developed abstract geometric patterns. The primary transformative force in his art lies in anthropomorphization; they bring to life objects or motifs that have been tucked away in our subconscious, emerging from our memories with endearing yet clumsy faces, seemingly sprouting hands and legs.
Mátyás Erményi (b. 1992, Budapest) earned a master's degree in painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2017. Since 2020 he has been creating works in which he recontextualises the visual heritage of Central Eastern Europe. He made his debut at acb Gallery in 2022 in the framework of a group exhibition entitled New Wave and had his first solo exhibition Dusty Doodles at acb in the same year. Mátyás Erményi took part in institutional exhibitions as well, such as the travelling group exhibition presented at MODEM in Debrecen, and then at Budapest Gallery in 2022. In addition to his solo exhibition hosted by the New Irokéz Gallery in Szombathely, the artist’s first solo show in Asia opened at the Double Q Gallery, in Hong Kong. This year, his participation at the SPARK Art Fair parallels his second solo exhibition at acb Gallery in Budapest.
