In Stone, Wood and Metal The Art of Ádám Farkas

The exhibition presenting the art of one of the most outstanding, internationally acclaimed representatives of contemporary Hungarian sculpture, Ádám Farkas (1944), focuses on the pivotal turning points and changes of form in the artist’s oeuvre, thus far spanning six decades. The most recent sculptures, including those from 2024, that are exhibited along with the older works not only represent the sculptural problems the artist has been exploring lately but, highlighting the creative value of the gesture, help to re-contextualise the oeuvre of earlier decades. A prominent role is played in Ádám Farkas’s way of thinking by the close interaction between nature and art and by the desire to capture their common laws in his art; they are equally manifest in the nobly simple yet complex formal language of his organic abstract sculpture as well as in its symbolism.

The exhibition seeks to also present the inner drives and philosophy underpinning this logically evolving oeuvre. Besides the emblematic sculptures and graphic sheets of the successive artistic periods, starting in the late 1960s, the exhibition also includes photographs of the most significant open-air projects and landscape sculptures. The prominent changes of form throughout the art of Ádám Farkas can be observed in every genre he has worked in: small sculpture, open-air works, political memorials, aluminium reliefs mounted on buildings, urban development plans, land art projects, funerary sculpture, coins, drawings and serigraphs. The early figurative sculptures, followed by an organic, abstract idiom drawing on the forms of the female body, the works based on wavy/undulating lines, the geometrical and organic sculptural systems, as well as the works analysing the connections between various forms were born not only out of sculptural considerations but also a unique view of life.

The artist’s nature-inspired philosophy and his observation of the laws of nature allow him to see the media he uses for his sculpture as far more than mere raw materials since he lends important emphasis to their organic connection with nature during the creative process. He himself expressed the essence of this in connection with our exhibition by saying: “I connect the order of all materials to the origin of three materials: stone is the primeval essence of existing materials, wood sustains life on earth, and metal is the fruit of man’s dexterity in crafting tools, both sustaining and destroying life. On a deeper level, a gesture is a dynamic moment of creation, while shades are a variant of order drawn from the infinity of light and shadow.”

The last thought is illustrated the most palpably in the last hall of the exhibition, where the atmosphere of a workshop is evoked, focusing attention on the material and the artist in dialogue with it: on the act of intent – the gesture – which conceives and creates the sculpture.

Emőke Bodonyi

curator of the exhibition