Curator: Andreas Fogarasi<\/span><\/p>\n Venue: Galerie Thomas Bernard, Cortex Athletico (Franciaorsz\u00e1g, P\u00e1rizs)<\/p>\n
The Off Biennale Budapest is a self organised project created by independent curators and artists based in Budapest. One of the aims is to develop and rely on structures that are not state funded, in a time when Hungary\u2019s rightwing government drastically alters the institutional structures in favour of a conservative and nationalist agenda or withdraws funding from contemporary art altogether.<\/p>\n
The exhibition at Cortex Athletico shows the work of four artists dealing with structures both spatial and societal and the strategies of escaping or challenging those structures. Although there are numerous conceptual connections between the artist of the show, the complexities and psychological momentum their work develops suggests to let go of any categorizing concept and trust the power of the individual works as well as the rich dialogues they evoke.<\/p>\n
Gy\u00f6rgy Jov\u00e1novics\u2019 sculptural work is strongly conceptual as well as informed by art history and literature. His meticulously constructed plaster reliefs build on the tension between surface and three-dimensional space, as well as between order and complexity. While living in Berlin in the 1980s he produced a series of colored plaster reliefs that seem to unite Turneresque graduations of colour with the advent of new \u201cwild painting\u201d of the 1980s. His two 1995 objects, enigmatically titled \u201cHouse of the Lavender Cultivator\u201d and \u201cHouse of Lavender Cultivator\u2019s wife\u201d turn his investigations of light and shadow into almost constructivist architectural models.<\/p>\n
Eva Kot\u2019\u00e1tkov\u00e1\u2019s collages deal with the individual\u2019s relationship to normative social structures and institutions, such as the government, school, or the family. She gives form to the invisible, disciplining force exerted by rules, conventions, and rituals: Cage-like objects, acting as physical restraints for body parts, cut-out illustrations from medical textbooks, and images of people tangled up in strings are recurring motifs in her work. Poetic, darkly humorous, and occasionally ominous, Kot\u2019\u00e1tkov\u00e1 counts Czech surrealism and absurdist literature among her sources of inspiration.<\/p>\n
Josef Dabernig\u2019s work is also often concerned with social norms and the body. His film Hypercrisis, edited according to a carefully structured system of predetermined time units, is set in a former recreation home for Soviet cinematographers in the South Caucasus, repurposed to accommodate writers. At present, only Boris Martow from Moscow, a talent from the promising times of the perestroika, is on the guest list. Amidst the faded glory of the institution for privileged artists, the poet tries to overcome his continuing creative crisis, while the staff (as usually played by Dabernig\u2019s friends and family) follows odd daily rituals.<\/p>\n
Zsolt Tibor\u2019s often large-scale drawings move between an analytic mapping of things, places and shapes, and the associative open-endedness of drawing on paper, although often paired with elements of collage and more recently painting. Tibor is occupied with general and eternal social questions. Personal and cultural occurrences and phenomena are all part of his work, on a pictorial level as well as on a technical one. The dilemmas of everyday monotony, day-today struggles and \u201cidyllic\u201d middle-class existence are dealt with in the form of copying, repetition, erasure, and a delicate balance between representation and abstraction.<\/p>\n
Gy\u00f6rgy Jov\u00e1novics (born 1939 in Budapest, lives and works in Budapest) is a preeminent Hungarian artist who started his career in the 1960s as part of the so called Iparterv group. He has gained international recognition among others by his exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia 1995. His work was shown only twice in Paris, at the 1972 Biennale des Jeunes (for which he was not allowed to leave Hungary), and at the Jeu de Paume\u2019s exhibition L\u2019autre moiti\u00e9 de l\u2019Europe in 2000.<\/p>\n
Eva Kot\u00e1tkov\u00e1\u2019s (born 1982 in Prague, lives and works in Prague) work was included in numerous international exhibitions, among other the Biennales of Venice, Moscow (both 2013), Sydney (2012) and Lyon (2011). This is the first time her work is shown in Paris.<\/p>\n
Josef Dabernig (born 1956 in K\u00f6tschach-Mauthen, lives and works in Vienna) films, photographs and sculptural works have been shown in museums and film festivals internationally. His solo show in 2014 incude Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, mumok \u2013 museum moderner kunst, stiftung ludwig wien, Vienna, Wilfried Lenz, Rotterdam, Kunstbunker \u2013 Forum f\u00fcr zeitgen\u00f6ssische Kunst, N\u00fcrnberg. His work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art morderne de la ville de Paris.<\/p>\n
Zsolt Tibor (born 1973 in Budapest, lives and works in Vienna) has had solo shows at Traf\u00f3 Gallery, Budapest (with Beatrix Sz\u00f6r\u00e9nyi), Lukas Feichtner Gallery, Vienna, among others and has had numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as SMAK, Ghent; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna, HIAP in Helsinki, and Kunstverein in Dortmund.<\/p>\n
Exhibiting artists: Gy\u00f6rgy Jov\u00e1novics, Eva Kot\u2019\u00e1tkov\u00e1, Josef Dabernig, Zsolt\u00a0Tibor <\/span><\/p>\n Curator: Andreas Fogarasi<\/span><\/p>\n Venue: Galerie Thomas Bernard, Cortex Athletico (Franciaorsz\u00e1g, P\u00e1rizs)<\/p>\n
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