Ferenc Ficzek: Slicing Spheres
Date: 19.04.2018-15.06.2018.
Opening show: 18 April 2018 (Wednesday) 7pm - 9pm
Spheres and their systematic slicing up is a characteristic motive in Ferenc Ficzek’s early works (1968-1969). Showing the influence of Ferenc Lantos’ artistic educational program and geometric views, spheres cut in two, four or more slices become the object of a dynamic structural examination in these pieces, which also evoke Moholy-Nagy’s constructivist spatial structure and Vasarely’s Op-art effects. These forms and their slices, usually sprayed on paper, then on enamel, more rarely painted with even surfaces on canvas, are also the starting point of a longer line of thought. From the beginning of the seventies, Ficzek develops this examination in two directions, when first seriality, then movement and its phases become central to his conceptual photo series.
Kendell Geers: EsemPlastiK – Biting The Hand That Feeds
Date: 19.04.2018-15.06.2018.
Opening show: 18 April 2018 (Wednesday) 7pm - 9pm
For his second solo exhibition at acb Gallery in Budapest, the Afro-Belgian artist Kendell Geers decided to invoke Coleridge, calling the show Biting The Hand That Feeds, weaving the warp of contradictions of his own biography through the weft of his work. Geers was born into Apartheid South Africa, but at a very tender age fled to London the regime as a refugee, seeking political asylum. Once Mandela was released and it was safe to return, he found himself back home, like the prodigal son, at the dawn of a new democracy.
Growing up on the front lines of the fight for freedom, democracy and civil liberty, Kendell Geers, believes that the worlds of art and politics should not be divided, that is only through embodied experience that the artist may give birth their creation. He eventually changed his date of birth to May 1968 in order to give birth to him self with an identity of his own making. Biting The Hand That Feeds takes the Holy Right Hand of St.Stephen as its starting point, a mysterious and magical mummified holy right fist of a 1,000 year old Saint and King now housed in the cathedral bearing his name in Budapest. To this religious relic, the artist adds an art historical bind, the infamous 1915 Readymade of Marcel Duchamp called In Advance of a Broken Arm, and Geers hands his own limbs cut off at the shoulder, cast in bronze and suspended on chains. The left hand makes the sign of Manu Fico and the right John the Baptist, ancient pagan and Christian symbols of fertility and initiation, used here to spiritualise the matter of contemporary art. For Geers, the work of art is both physical and meta-physical, an object, image, sign or token that speaks both of spiritualised matter and materialised spirit.
Károly Hopp-Halász: Modulated Bodies
Date: 19.04.2018-15.06.2018.
Opening show: 18 April 2018 (Wednesday) 7pm - 9pm
The second solo exhibition of Károly Hopp-Halász at acb Gallery presents a selection of photo-based works by the artist from the 1970s-80s, some of which have been hidden from the profession and the broad public until now. Partly owing to this, the contextualisation and localisation of these works within the artist's oeuvre has hitherto been incomplete. The works in the exhibition's focus have been recovered from the legacy of the deceased artist who passed away in 2016, therefore this show is based on this corpus of artworks currently under research and cataloguing. The exhibition at acb NA illustrates the mediatic interdisciplinarity of the Hopp-Halász oeuvre as well as the artist's relation to the represeantation of the male body. Our explicit intention with this selection is to encourage the reconsideration of discourses that threat and hush-up the artisst's homosexuality as a taboo to this day.