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György Kepes: Languages of VisionExhibition of the Works of an Art & Technology PioneerHungarian Cultural Center presents
György Kepes: Languages of Vision
Exhibition of the Works of an Art & Technology Pioneer
May 15 – September 19, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, May 15, 6-8pm |  |
| Hungarian Cultural Center presents György Kepes: Languages of Vision Exhibition of the Works of an Art & Technology Pioneer May 15 – September 19, 2008 Opening reception: Thursday, May 15, 6-8pm NEW YORK, NY, April 3, 2008 – The Hungarian Cultural Center will present seminal Hungarian artist and Founder of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies György Kepes. György Kepes: Languages of Vision features a selection of the artist’s works from the collection of the Kepes Visual Center in Eger, Hungary.  Juliette Roma, 1930 An artist, teacher, and writer, Kepes is known as the founding director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He aimed to establish new connections between the communities of art, science, technology, and industry. Kepes’ work addresses design education, the scientific technologies of image-making, and the societal and environmental implications of technology and media. Throughout his long and prolific career, Kepes created murals, kinetic installations, stained glass window projects and light-works. He also produced paintings, photographs, and photograms (photographic prints made by placing objects on sensitized paper and exposing the paper to light). Presenting Kepes’ paintings and photographic work, the exhibition brings together the different phases of his career from 1930 until the late 1980s. György Kepes founded MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies to break down the barriers between art and technology. Kepes felt there was no separation between science and art and, exploring these connections, he became a pioneer in new media practices. The Center was partly a response to his belief that traditional art forms could no longer adequately address the problems of the modern world. György Kepes was a friend and colleague of László Moholy-Nagy, working with him first in Berlin and then Chicago where he became head of the Light and Color Department at the New Bauhaus, the design school founded by Moholy-Nagy. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Trained as a painter at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Kepes abandoned painting in favor of film and photography after his move to Berlin in 1930. His earliest photographs on view picture the streets and the shop windows of the German capital. His formal experiments with perspective and multiple reflections demonstrate his interest in the photography of Russian-Soviet Constructivism and the Bauhaus, especially in the work of Alexander Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy. After his move to the United States in 1937, Kepes created photographs displaying the contrasting optical effects and patterns of shadow and light on a multitude of geometric forms and arrangements. Continuing to attest the influence of his lumino-kinetic artworks, in the 1970s he launched a series of color photographs in which he captured the changing visual phenomena of organic matters such as liquid substances (Color Inks in Water, 1976). Famously proclaiming, that he is “not a photographer, but an artist working with light”, Kepes also worked in the medium of generative photography, experimenting with photograms, as well as “photo-drawings” in which—exploring the possibilities of clichés-verre—he used painted glass plates as negatives. Stressing the indexical nature of the photographic print and inverting the relationship between light and dark, the photograms remained in the forefront of his interest until the early 80s. His dreamlike photographic explorations of matter, space, and light were also translated into his pictorial works. After rejecting the medium of painting, he returned to it in the late 1950s, composing a series of often collages-based small-scale abstract works. The solidity of the painted geometric forms and planes is juxtaposed by the vapor-like, atmospheric colors, as well as the apparently random patterns of the surface, achieved by the mixing of sand with oil paint. Aiming to recreate the chromatic interactions of matter, light and space, and emulate such natural processes as the changing states of organic material, the paintings often evoke oxidized or decomposed surfaces, and suggest figurative forms or landscapes. From the early 1980s, Kepes superimposed layers of highly saturated, glazed colors by stenciled numbers, and thus complemented the systematic exploration of such elements of the language of vision as geometry and color by yet another system of signs. As in his photographic works, his paintings too engage the realities and the phantasmagoria of nature and technology, demonstrating the correspondences and disparities of the language of vision across time and media.  Befejezetlen farost olaj, 1971 ABOUT THE ARTIST György Kepes was born in 1906, in Selyp, Hungary. After studying painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1924-1928), he participated in the activities of MA, the Hungarian avant-garde group lead by Lajos Kassák. In 1930, to the invitation of fellow Hungarian, László Moholy-Nagy, he moved to Berlin where he produced graphic works for the Rote Hilfe publishing house, designed exhibitions, and created stage and film sets. Around this time, he designed the dust jacket for Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim’s famous book, Film als Kunst (Film as Art), one of the first published books on film theory. While working in the proximity of the Bauhaus, he became acquainted with the cinematic theories of the Russian-Soviet avant-garde and abandoning painting, turned to photography and film as his primary media. In 1936, he immigrated to London, then a year later to Chicago, where he became the head of the Light and Color Department of the newly founded New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design). Kepes in the United States After the publication of his seminal book Language of Vision (1944) which brought together Bauhaus practices of visual design with theories of Gestalt and visual perception, he moved to Cambridge and taught visual design at the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1956 Kepes published his second book, The New Landscape in Art and Science which—through images produced by new technologies—demonstrated the similarities of visual patterns and formal organizations in art and nature. In the 1960s, he edited Vision and Value, a seven-volume book comprised of the writings of such architects, scientists, and artists as Buckminster Fuller, Alison and Peter Smithson, Max Bill, and Siegfried Giedion, and organized such exhibitions as Light as a Creative Medium (Carpenter Visual Arts Center, Harvard University, 1966). In 1967, he founded MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and served as its director until 1972. CAVS’s multidisciplinary program linked sciences and the humanities, aiming to create socially responsible and environmentally conscious collaborations among visual artists, architects, engineers, city planners, mathematicians, and industrial designers. CAVS’s fellows introduced the use of new image-making devices and scientific technologies into the arts. Kepes showed his paintings regularly at the Boston’s Alpha Gallery and had a retrospective exhibition of his photographs at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1984. In 1989 he bequeathed his estate to Hungary. The Kepes Museum—housing a major collection of his artworks and archives—opened in Eger, Hungary in 1995. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Kepes was awarded, among others, the Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1996 he received the Medal of Honor and the Middle Cross of the Republic of Hungary. His paintings and photographs are represented in the permanent collections of (among many others) The Brooklyn Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Kepes died in 2001, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Hungarian Cultural Center 447 Broadway, 5th Floor, NYC (T) 212.750.4450 www.culturehungary.org Open hours Monday-Friday, 9-5pm or weekends by appointment |
