György Szőnyei: GUITAR COMPOSITIONS. Collages and reliefs

An exhibition of György Szőnyei's guitar-collages and reliefs is on view at the Ernst Museum's Dorottya Gallery. Following his paintings that follow geometric art from various perspectives, György Szőnyei began engaging with the guitar motif two years ago. The guitar-collages that put to use the flyers, advertising and junkmail thrown into our postboxes take the basic form of the instrument as an inspiring point of departure, resulting in diversified, playful, humorous solutions, in which the product of consumer society, advertising brochures are employed in an original interpretation, constituting the details of the object that is an element of the still life in the product-pictures that take form. The same approach characterises the guitar-reliefs that are likewise presented, and which employ the images visible on the cartons that serve for packing from a new perspective. The ironic tone that induces a shift in viewpoint feeds from the traditions of the classic avant-garde. From the guitar motif and the technique of collage, the Cubists might come to our minds, who were inclined to use both, while we might associate the treatment of rubbish as basic material with the dadaists, and in particular with Kurt Schwitters. The timeliness of all these, the shaping of a circuit from consumer wastefulness - at least on the level of art, the attraction of exciting basic forms, the play with the pictures of objects, makes it seem that nothing has changed with the passing of the times.