Random Utterness

Random Utterness

a group exhibition presenting works by New York-based artists of Hungarian origin

curated by Agnes Berecz

DATES: January 24 – March 8, 2008

 Opening: Thursday, January 24th, 6:00pm-9:00pm

 Open hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm

PLACE: Hungarian Cultural Center, 447 Broadway, 5^th Floor, New York, NY 10013

ADMISSION: Free

The first installment of a two-part group exhibition, Random Utterness presents works by New York-based artists of Hungarian origin. The exhibition brings together established and emerging artists using a wide range of media. The X-ray-based works of Agnes Denes, the projected paintings of George Peck, and the gestural drawings of Tamás Vészi (bridging printmaking with the radiographic image, and painting with video projection or drawing) investigate how images can be translated and reconfigured from one medium to another. The photographs of Sylvia Plachy and Mónika Sziládi explore places and people, transforming urban life into fragmented landscapes and people into frozen, still-life objects.

Bridging printmaking with the radiographic image, Agnes Denes’s Kingdom-series of the early ‘80s, merges scientific image making with the depiction of the physical world. Dealing with the taxonomy of images and nature, her flower-prints recall the 1920s photographs of Karl Blossfeldt or Albert Renger-Patzsch. Using X-ray pictures, Denes transforms the internal structure of the flower into its image, and explores methodologies of photography and printmaking, transparency and indexical print. Defying the separation of two cultures, her work models the connections between scientific innovation and creativity, the technology of the image and the poetics of nature, while practicing art as a method of epistemological inquiry.

In George Peck’s Projected Paintings slow-motion images are projected on amorphous screens, composed of semi-transparent nylon scrims, painted with acrylic and polymer. The screens both reflect and absorb light and image which, as a result, materializes not only on the surface but also in the body of the screen. The double projection destabilizes our perception of form, space, and time, creating a palimpsest-like structure which operates as a sequence of appearing and dissolving images. In his 2004 Black Madonna II (Who’s Madonna), Peck presents painting as projected image, literalizes the tradition of classical Western painting where space was conceived in projection, while also dealing with the politics of representation, issues of race and visibility.

Sylvia Plachy’s photographs transform urban life into fragmented landscapes and visions. Playing on the aesthetic of the spontaneous and the poetics of chance, Plachy’s photographs relate to, yet also clash with, the conventions of the snapshot and New York street photography. The ultimate flâneur, she observes the city in search of its optical unconscious, refusing to picture panoptic totalities or to capture decisive moments. The reflective surfaces and the fluid, distorted spatial configurations of her photographs represent the sights and inhabitants of New York as both intimate and unfamiliar, converting the banal into arresting but subdued lyricism. Mapping New York through a visionary repossession of the city, Plachy’s urban phenomenology portrays viewing and dwelling as a joint experience.   

Tamás Vészi’s works on paper thematize the relations of painting and drawing. Based on a series of painted canvases, these large-scale works subvert the conventional order of image making. The biomorphic shapes and figurative fragments—produced with watercolor, pencil, or oilstick—appear as textured, multi-layered surfaces. As in an inventory of mark-making, the paper ground is sectioned by expressive gestures, graphic lines, stains, scribbles and drippings, as well as by patterns of chromatic contrasts. Painterly in both their method and scale, Vészi’s drawings display the eroticism of material and gesture; through their titles suggest symbolical narratives, and with their recurring motifs and colors convey cinematic effects.

The images of Mónika Sziládi’s photographic series, Still, present family members and acquaintances in their homes. The neither staged, nor snapshot-like portraits show people caught in everyday acts and situations, absorbed, and staring, seemingly unaware of Sziladi’s presence, while also revealing the connections between models, as well as the objects of their environments. At once striking and blank, her subjects (despite their motionlessness) imply a sense of intense presence and gravity. Conscious of the hierarchy between model and photographer, as well as of the objectifying gaze of the camera, Sziládi’s photographs negotiate the relations between looking and being looked at, gaze and desire, stillness and motion.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS                                                               

Agnes Denes is one of the early pioneers of the environmental art movement and conceptual art. Interested in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, poetry and music, Denes has addressed ecological, cultural and social issues in her work on an often monumental scale. Her drawings, prints, books, performances, earthworks and photo-based projects has been featured at more than 350 solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Cornell University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as at the Venice Biennale and Documenta. A research fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University; the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T.; and DAAD in Berlin, Denes has lectured extensively at universities in the US and abroad. The author of numerous books, she holds an honorary doctorate in fine arts, and has completed commissions in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. She is also the recipient of numerous awards, including four National Endowment Fellowships, the McDermott Award from M.I.T.; the Watson Award from Carnegie Mellon U.; and the Rome Prize, from the American Academy in Rome in 1998. Denes lives and works in New York.

George Peck was born in Hungary and emigrated from Budapest in 1957. He studied at the City College in New York, and from 1964 to 1966, with Josef Albers at the Yale University. His work comprises of monochromes, a series of muslin-based and stenciled paintings, murals, as well as monumental, freestanding diaphanous works. Since the early 2000s, he has been working with video exploring both histories of Western painting and current political and social conditions. His recent Projected Paintings use laboriously constructed, polymorphous sculptural screens and projected images in simultaneous, double projection. Peck has been regularly exhibiting his work since 1964. His paintings are represented in numerous public collections in both Europe and the US. He lives and works in New York and Buskirk, NY. http://www.georgepeck.net/

Sylvia Plachy was born in 1943 in Hungary and immigrated to the United States with her parents in 1958. She started to photograph in 1964. The recipient of The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship and The Lucie Award, Plachy is a regular contributor at The New Yorker and her work has appeared in many publications, including Fortune, Grand Street, Art Forum, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine and Granta. Her black-and-white photographs recording the life of New York City have been published in the weekly column of The Village Voice under the heading "Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour". The author of several highly acclaimed books, she has taught and lectured widely and her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. She lives and works in New York.

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Mónika Sziládi was born in Budapest in 1974. She studied photography in Germany, France and in the US, and art history at the Université Paris IV/Sorbonne in Paris, France. Taking their subjects from the everyday life, Sziládi’s photographs investigate and reassess the traditions of portrait, snapshot, as well as staged and street photography. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions in Hungary, Germany and the US. As a graphic designer she has worked with many prestigious New York-based gallery and has designed books and exhibition catalogues such as Louise Lawler and Others (Kunstmuseum Basel/Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Hatje Cantz, 2004). Sziládi lives and works in New York. http://www.msziladi.com/

Tamás Vészi was born in Budapest in 1972. He attended the Free Art School of Szentendre held by the Lajos Vajda Studio, where at a very early age he became familiar with contemporary art, painting, video art, performance and conceptual thinking. In 1998 he and several other residents of 70 Commercial Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn formed the group “Greenpoint Riverfront Artists.” In 2006 Tamas finished his Masters of Fine Arts degree at Brooklyn College.  The works on paper in this exhibition are part of the “Allegory of the Trinary” series from 2007. http://www.veszi.com/