acb Gallery presents its third solo exhibition of Marcell Esterházy’s works. Titled compare (cf.), the artist’s 2013 debut focused on the thematic features characteristic of Esterházy, such as family history examined in a broader historical context or through personal attachments and memories. The works exhibited at his show Night Blindness at the acb Attachment in 2017 were rooted even more radically in an even more private phenomenon of memory and coping with the past: the experience of mourning. Opening on July 28th, the exhibition Factum presents a selection from Esterházy’s recent works, this time related more to general political and media theoretical issues than to the crisis of the accessibility of reality and the credibility of representations. Dealing with communication and the uncertainty of factuality (which already had a significant role in the works at the 2015 exhibition Meaning at the Capra Center), these works rekindle the technical and mediatic procedures characteristic of Esterházy’s practice, including re-enactment and the gesture of appropriating found images, the symbology of the hand, which spans across his oeuvre, or the evocation of such historical sources and objects as the first optical telegraph.

Marcell Esterházy graduated in 2003 at the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, then lived and worked in Marseille and Paris for a decade. He won Special Mention of the Jury at the 2004 Lucien and Rudolf Hervé Award, in 2009 he won the FKSE’s Studio Prize as well as the Derkovits Grant. In 2015 he was shortlisted for the European Month of Photography Arendt Award. His works can be found at the Ludwig Museum, the Marseille Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art – Dunaújváros as well as private collections.