About Tamás Lossonczy

Tamás Lossonczy was born in Budapest, in 1904. After graduating from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1926, he traveled to Paris and Amsterdam. Following his interest in architecture and design, between 1929 and 1931, he attended the department of interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts. A member of the Group of Socialist Artists since 1934, he worked as a designer in the architectural office of Farkas Molnár and, abandoning painting, produced a series of spatial constructions. In 1937 he traveled to Paris on a study trip. Upon his return to Hungary – following the advice of his wife, the sculptor, Ibolya Lossonczy – he took up painting again. His abstract works, titled Configurations, featured expressive chromatic variations of organic and geometric shapes. His first solo exhibition was organized by the critic, Ernest Kállai in 1943 in Budapest. After WWII, Lossonczy joined the European School (1945-48), a short lived yet influential group of the Hungarian avant-garde, as well as the Hungarian Group of Abstract Artists. Besides his abstract paintings – described by Kállai as examples of the so-called “bioromanticism” – he also produced a sequence of reliefs (String Pictures, 1946-48), based on entangled constructions of rope appearing on nailed wood panels. After the 1948 installation of the Soviet-type political regime in Hungary, he worked on a series of landscapes and still-life paintings. Between 1957 and 1968, he taught drawing at an industrial school in Budapest. Great Cleansing Storm (1961-62), an emblematic work commemorating the political traumas of postwar Hungary, including the 1956 revolution, was produced around this time, along with a diverse body of work, comprised of both figurative and abstract paintings, as well as wire-based sculptures. Following a trip to Paris in 1969, he had a solo exhibition in the Adolf Fényes Gallery of Budapest. His growing visibility and critical acclaim was also secured by the publication of Mária Bozóky’s monographic study of his work in 1976, and three years later, by his retrospective exhibition held at the Kunsthalle of Budapest. A founding member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, established by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1992, he won the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest-ranking award, in 1994. Lossonczy’s work has been featured at numerous exhibitions in both Europe and the US. He is represented, among others, in the permanent collections of the Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest, Hungary), the Museum of Contemporary Art/Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), and the Jerusalem Museum (Jerusalem, Israel). He lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.

   BALÁZS TURAY, PHOTOGRAPHER

'Budapest-Rome-Prague', 1997-2002

I made my first cityscape on a bright, sunny Sunday morning in 1997. I took a short walk to a nearby bridge over the rail road leading to the north from the oldest station of Budapest. I had my home-made camera with me,  two metal film holders, a tripod, a light meter and a black cloth to cover the ground glass. This first photo depicts an old Railway Station and a locomotive covered with steam and smoke. Since then I made a few dozens of cityscapes that are actually 3 ½” x 4 ¾” contact prints.

Despite of using different large format cameras and even self coated glass negatives, I was interested mainly in outlines, in the shape of buildings, and the shape of lights and shadows on these buildings, walls, columns, etc. In taking my Budapest photographs since 1999  I followed no historical or documentary  concept. A year later in Rome, my most beloved city, I made photos in a concept of  depicting the old Forums and the new versions of them in the E.U.R. quarter  built on the edge of the city in the 1940's. I made altogether 40 pictures in Rome on different glass plates between 1999 and 2001. Almost all the scenes I studied two, or maybe three times during each visit to consider light conditions, make sketches and to compare new sights with initial pictures. Many of these photographs are rooted in drawing lessons and sketches of architectural fragments that I have had since I was a child. In 2000 and 2001 I photographed almost every Eastern-European capitol with the same approach as I used in Budapest-Rome-Prague.

'Katowice', 2006-

I have always been interested in the history of Eastern-Europe and recently I am more often  rethinking political and moral dilemmas of our region. As the European Union could bring not only more freedom in traveling, but also the necessity of painful reforms and wide spread structural changes even of our societies, many turn towards the dark ideas that ruined the continent in the 20^th century. As everyday violence between ordinary people, which in the postwar era we have witnessed only in Yugoslavia arises also in Hungary and Slovakia, one gets the impression that things repeat themselves – in the history of country our region, or in the story of one person.

I am again walking the streets of Budapest, Katowice as well, taking photographs from dusk till the wee  hours. Through capturing night scenes, an atmosphere of instability, a feeling of being abandoned and unimportant, I try to show how deep we may fall again if a society is unable to appreciate the basic values of education, cultural diversity, or more often the right of free speech.

Holding a 35 mm camera I try to depict the still ruined cities of Silesia and another side of Budapest to document symbolic places and the remaining marks of the past.  These new photos are often out of focus, or simply blurred images of streets, outskirts, alleys and pubs, abandoned factories, mines and railway stations.

www.turay.hu

The result of a collaboration between artists and architects, curators and institutions, The Other City is an international exhibition in two venues. Featuring works made on both sides of the Atlantic, the exhibition explores the ideologies behind the postwar initiatives of public housing projects, the conditions these buildings have provided for their inhabitants, as well as the agenda of those who support or criticize them. The two venues represent two different approaches: in the Romanian Gallery, we show works that deal with social reality, everyday situations, and personal narratives; in the Hungarian Cultural Center, the works address housing projects from a historical and ideological perspective. While the exhibitions mainly discuss the fundamental concepts, historical moments, and the current post-socialist climate, we believe they will also provoke the New York audience to contemplate and question housing projects in the US.

The works are in a variety of media, from films that trace the transformation of the cityscape over decades (Józef Robakowski) to research-based descriptions of personalized spaces (Mircea Cantor, Ágnes Dénes/Zsolt Keserue/Levente Polyák/Borbála Szalai) and installations showing possible future scenarios (Miklós Mécs, Mircea Munteanu). Ideologies appear as critical observation (Michael Rakowitz, Tadej Pogačar), playful speculation (Société Réaliste, Terence Gower) or narratives for reading the city (Florin Tudor and Mona Vătămanu).

Curated by Hajnalka Somogyi and Samu Szemerey

HUNGARY  TO DUMBO

Aritst Street Project 

Not For Thought Alone: The Stuffed Cabbage Project

 
The Hungarian Cultural Center invited select New York- and Budapest-based artists to create works in any media based on their sampling of one of Hungary’s favorite dishes, stuffed cabbage. Both a street event and an experimental art project, Not For Thought Alone, will feature works by Jinkee Choi, Ágnes Eperjesi, Marie Losier, Trong B. Nguyen and Petra Valentova.

Date: September 28-29, 2007

Location: Water Street between Main and Dock Street, and Brooklyn Bridge Park
 

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Gallery Exhibition

Remarks from yesterday for tomorrow

Exhibition organized by the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York

Participating Artists:

HINTS Group (Eszter Ágnes Szabó, Anikó Szövényi, Tamás Ilauszky), Hajnal Németh, Andrea Schneemeier, PP Group (Katarina Sevic, Zita Majoros), Csaba Nemes, Richard Garami-Farkas Varga Gábor (Collaboration project, involving local artists)

The exhibition features artists from Hungary who are focusing on current and relevant issues of local and global societies. By exploring the ever-changing relations between personal and political, human and natural, they compute and challenge our present political and environmental consciousness. 

Their provocations include a recycling workshop where visitors can create their own handbag or notebook from used fruit juice cartons and street ad vinyl; a collaborative lawnmower project in Brooklyn Bridge Park; a contemporary urban prayer-wheel; and an exchange project of t-shirts with well-known political logos.

 
Dates: September 28-30, 2007

Location: Gallery 212, 111 Front Street, DUMBO

Levente Baranyai’s paintings are aerial views of urban and rural landscapes. Working as an indoor pilot, Baranyai unsettles our sense of orientation: what we see as unfolding in the depth below is experienced frontally, right in front of us. Using the photographs taken from such various sources as the National Geographic, Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s The Earth from Above, or tourist postcards, he translates photographic images into paintings, while also investing them with physical presence through densely textured, quasi-sculptural surfaces. His paintings are constructed in three consecutive phases: first, the artist applies a thick ground layer to the canvas, determining the basic masses and shapes of the composition, then he sticks on clingy bits of half-dry paint that constitute the three-dimensional elements, and finally, he adds layers of dry glazes to point up the light and deepen the shadows. Both paintings and reliefs, his works recall relief maps, and soliloquize the relationship between surface and space, horizontal and vertical, floor and wall, sculpture and painting.

When we picture a visual sign with poignant meaning, like a significant object (knife, apple, or Lenin’s head) without its natural enviroment or without its related thoughts, and we degrade it to a motive (whether by repeating it or in any other way), then not only will the given object be in a different constellation, but the value it used to represent becomes questionable, and the system where this was defined as good or bad, suddenly falls apart. The current, the objective, is gone. By clashing the subjects, we picture different things that do not go together in real life, but do very well on canvas where they go beyond themselves. They show each other’s face, their common face, they open up gates to multiple dimensions. Through these gates we can look down from above to something what we thought was real life. If we do this by putting words and sentences on the empty canvas, on the paper, then we will achieve a similar effect, what we can call ’typography’. By putting these disparate subjects next to or above each other, you can read between the lines. This is the similarity. However, we can not call it a picture, because a picture is more international – typography requires the knowledge of the language, only then can it be interpreted properly. The reason I’m saying properly, because we can gather visual information without of the knowledge of the language. There are several tools to achieve this: the color and thickness of the letters; referring at things, happenings, emotions by fading. In this respect, typography and painting are similar. What is the line that separates them? It’s impossible to decide. It’s possible to imagine a typography-painting which speaks to us in a non-existing language, only visually. I would like to explore the effect of these two approaches beside each other, as well as their ability to change each other’s meaning by using oil and canvas techniques.

Dénes Wächter