"I'm researching the eternity of small things, because they too may include in themselves the drama of the Last Jugement" (Pál Deim)
The 74 years old Pál Deim is the one of the classical figure of the modern and contemporary Hungarian art scene. The retrospective exhibition in the Ernst Museum is a tribute to his artistic ingenuity.
Pál Deim was born in Szentendre, a small town well-known from the 1920' for its artist colony. Szendendre together with its surroundings and society has the ability to influence the never ending discoure on art and its purposes. The Danube and and the Mediterranian like mountains around the town create the unique Szentendre athosphere - a very meeting point for different cultures (Hungarian and Serb) and religions (Greek- and Roman Catholic).
In the first period of his artistic creativity Deim painted mostly details of his home town (walls, metal and stone crosses) and by the end of the 60' he created his idolic puppets what later became a permanent topic of his abstract - geometric painting. The Idol (puppet) - represented as print, as shadow or under many other different form - became the central reference point and the cohesive force in his paintings.
In 1978 Deim prepared a list of all the association recalled to the puppet: (nam, woman, mummy, positive, negative, standing, lying, black, red, mountain, primitive worn, rocket, programmed, presence, absence, grate, hiding place, ancestress, bower, house, cave, coffin, incursion, floating, space, calm, organic, impersonal, without face, everybody, alone) and the joined double-puppet (couple, adam-eve, mankind, fellows, love, making love, fructification, together, cuddled up, dread, fear, defencelessness, humiliated people, positive-negative, light-shadow, opposition, unity, safety, whole, relationship, negation, ouverture, beginning, end). The transformation of the puppet - from the birth till the death - will be shown by pictures and sculptures at the exhibition, his way is hard, painful but joyful at the same time.
Deim's works were exhibited in 1992 for the last time in Budapest exactly in the Ernst Musem. Now, fourteen years later the Ernst Museum took the challenge to present to the public Deim's work from the last period.