Áron Gábor: Poll
Áron Gábor (1954) has been active as a painter, graphic artist, sculptor and performer since the early eighties, while he has marked his presence on the contemporary fine arts scene with his installations and video projects. He creates his works, in which elements of various systems are powerfully combined and given several visual layers, by embedding them in a form that encapsulates his experiences and allows countless semantic layers to coexist freely.
The exhibition in the Műcsarnok showcases three out of the thus far thirteen themes in the artist’s oeuvre: focusing on the artist’s works made in the eighties, in the nineties and in more recent times, it further expands the scope of correlations in his art.
Displayed in the first exhibition space are works that were conceived in the eighties – at the beginning of the heyday of installation and performance, as well as video and computer art in Hungary – through a desire to ask questions, contemplate and explore; the displayed panel pictures, triptychs, an installation and a performance video are organised around the themes of his series Poll and Animals.
Exhibited in the middle space is the series Heads, made in the nineties, in the protracted period of the change in the political system in Hungary, which, appearing as frozen stills, virtually surround visitors like a group of witnesses. Áron Gábor’s performance House of Europe took place in 1990 as an attempt to understand change and the essence of what it means to belong to Europe. The video recording made of the event re-contextualises the Heads, modelled on us, and makes them into the participants of the performance.
The third section of the exhibition is devoted to the series In the Mirror of the Eyes (2020), inspired by the recent pandemic, when mask-wearing focused even greater attention on the mirrors of the soul. The visual experience of this served as a catalyst for the extraordinarily sensitive graphic pieces of the cycle.
The most recent works of the inevitably decomposed series Part and Whole (2022-2023) seek to capture the perpetually changing macro- and microcosm and, albeit momentarily still, are filled with life and remarkable harmony. In these compositions, mostly drawn in ink and chalk, abstract and geometrical forms complement each other, while, thanks to the multi-layeredness of the pictures and the impossibility to determine centres in them that would dominate their plane, they appear as brilliant constructions of exceptional moments of reception distinguished by an ethereal quality not fearing the void and enchanting us with confident ease.
Szilvia Reischl
curator of the exhibition