Szurcsik József: Opusculum - Világok találkozása

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An exhibition revived from the original WordPress archive of the Godot Gallery.

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The Godot Gallery respectfully invites

József Szurcsik

Opusculum – Meeting of Worlds / Pictures, Sculptures

to the opening of the exhibition titled

On 14 March at 2008 20 o’clock.

Opening: Art historian Katalin Nagy

Cooperates: Uzgin Üver band

Available for viewing: March 10 – 29

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In the current exhibition we can see sculptures and rotating images. Each work – an opusculum – is a small piece in which the artist experiments with a particular interpretation of space. The twisted, welded and weld‑sketched iron and steel sculptures were produced at 2006 and 2007. Faces hidden between flat surfaces and layers of space are works that introduce fresh perspectives on matters of bodily situations, relationships and concealment, just as drawings and paintings compressed into a solid form do. The rotating images are characterised by multi‑view compositions. A particular challenge in creating the works was the alteration that emerges through rotation, reshaping the relationship between the elements of the image.

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His career began in the second half of the 80s. He finished the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1985 and, a year later, the fine‑arts postgraduate programme in 1988. By then, the avant‑garde had become a sacrifice, and young artists such as GalluszGyöngyi, KótaiTamás, SzíjKamilla, and others had begun working in a more austere new‑conceptual, somewhat minimal style, while at the same time the so‑called “blue steelmen” (KunglGyörgy, KicsinyBalázs, etc.) who satirised the social space also emerged. Szurcsik, however, chose a different path. His early, somewhat socially critical works can be linked to the new materialism, but they differ from it in that while the former tended to demythologise and objectify their themes, Szurcsik tended to mythologise his own. His monumental, eternal‑radiant stone heads, city walls and other subjects were enveloped in the mood of older myths, much like the works of GaálJózsef that began a few years earlier. It is no accident that he refers to Egyptian art in connection with his monumental stone figures in Mátészalka, for the graphic painter also cites it: “…I especially love Egyptian art. For me that is the pinnacle. I like the beautifully simplified forms… It makes one wonder what sustains things for several thousand years? Power, of course. It is the social arrangement, the political system that preserves things. But where is the role of the individual? Because in the 20th century I still awaken with the conviction that INDIVIDUALITY! Fashion, however, determines our movement. Everyone needs the same pair of trousers, and we gradually give up our uniqueness.” In the middle of the 90s, in its second half, he abandoned painting and drawing in the half‑profile, painting and drawing heads only in an equivalent manner, formulating them from objects, fish scales, and fish. In 1995 he depicted, in the Szentendre Artists' Colony Gallery, twelve paintings and the same number of ink drawings of fish with human heads, a year later at the Vigadó Gallery oil paintings with human faces and plastic fish were shown, which were at the same time objects and archaic figures painted in half‑profile. In 1997 he painted sharp, pointed knives set against a colourful – blue, green, red – often tinged background, whose blades or teeth formed human heads (Jaded Knife, 1997). After this apparent digression he returned to the half‑profile human heads, which twist into spirals, fan out from a funnel shape, or even pop out of the canvas; from 1997, he begins painting his pictures with a colourful, tinged technique that becomes plastically effective (Great Stone Keeper, 1997).

Loska Lajos

The exhibition is part of the programme of the Budapest Spring Festival.

Open from Tuesday to Friday 10 to 18, and on Saturday between 10 and 13.

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