Ripped and Burned Graphics in Plexiglass

The 70th year jubilee exhibition of LÁSZLÓ PAIZS

"I feel that I am free; I can compose artworks from anything at all, as for quite some time, I am not interested in the path determined by theory... I have always wanted to try everything that inspired me, everything that in its material, technique or genre moved my imagination" - the artist proclaimed a few years ago in an interview. Paizs is 70-years-old this year, and the essence of these lines still holds true today. László Paizs has been one of the determining figures of Hungarian contemporary art since the 1960s, employing the methods and results of Pop Art in his own way towards the realisation of his works. He has remained eternally capable of renewal, executing his ideas with constant zeal and energy in his work.

In his exhibition organised in the Dorottya Gallery as a jubilee to celebrate his 70 years, he presents graphic works prepared by employing the material that has long been connected with his name: plexiglass – in a new way. He has assembled his collages that appear to be abstract from burnt and ripped pieces of paper, but which depict figures taken primarily from mythology and Christian culture, and which he has rendered everlasting by a special method. He has embedded the compositions between two sheets of plexiglass. Between the plexi-sheets, it is not only the trace of burning, but also the paper which has been carbonised black, the ashes, that he has immortalised, and which renders the vision even more extraordinary. In these multi-layered works, the expressive collages become three-dimensional graphic works. In László Paizs's artworks, the artistic intention and the synthetic material accomplish the work of the amber we know from nature: the preservation of "treasures" sheathed in transparency.

Vernissage: Tuesday, 6 December 2005, at 6 p.m.

The exhibition is opened by Marcell Jankovics