Opening: 8th of October (Tuesday), 2024, 6 PM

Opening speech by: Dávid Merényi artist

Exhibition duration: 8-12th of October, 2024

The exhibition features a selection of my works on paper with oil sticks and polaroid images, which are in dialogue with each other in a new kind of relationship.

The oil stick is a quasi-condensed oil paint. Its two-finger thickness and slightly lipstick-like texture makes it less detailed to work with, which automatically brings with it more generous surface treatment, brisk, fast, gestural, expressive, and experimental ways of making images. These qualities combine to produce a kind of abstraction. In contrast, the documentary nature of the photographs creates a tension between the two different approaches and genres of capturing reality, but they also function as complementary and interpretive horizons.

For 11 years I have been working on highlighting the artistic aspects of the 21st-century problem of compulsive hoarding and the resulting clutter. For years, the intimate spaces and interiors of our family home were the focus of my work, and then expanded to include venues for friends, acquaintances and strangers. I am interested in the creative exploration of the relationship between the environment and humans, bearing in mind the observation and exploration of the sociological and psychological phenomena behind them. In recent years, in addition to interiors, the depiction of exterior spaces has also become central in my artistic practice; back gardens, courtyards, workshops, storage rooms, garages and various service rooms. The yard is an extension of the house, which gives us just as much information about the people who live there as the rest of the house does. These spaces are often filled with messy, piled up accumulations of a mish-mash of things, which act as “blind spots” that the gaze should avoid as they do “not fit into the picture”. These random objects create a collage-like mixture and transform into a kind of “DIY installation”.

/Dia Zékány/