The Mechanics of the Canvas

The exhibit is an event in the series What’s Up – A Panorama of Hungarian Contemporary Art, organized by Műcsarnok as part of the Year of Renaissance – 2008 in the ERNST MUSEUM.

Curator: Fenyvesi Áron

Partner institution: Studio of Young Artists Association This exhibition of the Young Artists’ Studio Association tries to establish what relevance the youngest generations of Hungarian artists attribute to painting and the format of the easel painting. Having survived the past few decades, the latter seems indestructible, and it is worth examining what challenges the questions and formal problems generated by alternative support surfaces present to thinking about painting. Can the problems of painting be treated independently of the technique of oil on canvas? Can the same problems, independent of any media, be considered painting?

Those quasi-painterly attempts are in focus that incorporate the conclusions of other media into the increasingly fuzzy art of the canvas, and what can with growing justification be considered full-blown trends in contemporary Hungarian painting. These works and artists are as comfortable with drawing, installation, aquarelle, concept art and sculpture as with the techniques of oil painting and photography. The exhibition explores those formal and theoretical problems that may push out the experimental boundaries of contemporary painting.

At this exhibition, artistic experimentation does not stop at the canvas, the support normally associated with painting, but embraces the monumentality of the wall, the variety of installation environments, and what seems to possess an almost existentialist meaning, the whiteness of the paper. Under the aegis of blurred generic boundaries, the show features works which operate with sketchy forms, barbed lines, distilled moods or scenical effects.