Tamás Hencze: Atmosphere
The first solo exhibition of Tamás Hencze (1938-2018) realised in the space of acb Plus is focusing on the 1970s painting practice of the artist, which came to it’s full bloom in this decade.
Schedule
Hencze is one of the key painters of his neovantgarde generation, which was labelled as Iparterv generation after the legendary exhibitions realised in an aula of a Budapest-based construction company. Tamás Hencze from the end of the 1960s created mostly paper-based works, with which he transcended the visuality of his early-career pieces, influenced by French-inspired gesture painting, which idolised the subjective gestures of the artist. Hencze created his artworks in the late 1960s and 1970s with rolls and cylinders used in printing technoogy, and he painted mostly with offset paint also applied in printing houses. His most known works examine the limits and the mechanisms of perception, with structures constructed from stains, oval spots, which have dissolved contours, and also from stripes which sometime become very thin lines. Thus the abstract painting practice of Hencze gravitated towards minimalism, structuralism even conceptualism in the 1970s. The artist aimed to achieve more and more objective forms of representation, which don’t include any personal, subjective gestures. His methodology was based on the use of a very reduced, cold color palette, and an extremely stimulating visuality. The use of reduced monochrome, black and white aesthetics also help in constructing an almost engineer-like signature painting style.
acb Gallery
Founded in Budapest in 2003, acb Gallery has consistently grown in the past two decades establishing itself as one of the leading actors in the Hungarian and Eastern European art market. Initially, the gallery’s focus was on Hungarian and international emerging and mid-generation neo-conceptual artists, who became active after the political changes in the former Eastern Bloc in 1990. Since then, the gallery has expanded its focus, and now represents numerous Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists who have left their mark on art history since the 1960s and 1970s, as well as members of the youngest generations beside the already established ones.
Since the autumn of 2022, acb runs three exhibition spaces: the main gallery space, acb Attachment, which serves as a project space, and acb Plus, dedicated to large-scale solo and group presentations.
acb’s research and publishing department, acb ResearchLab was founded in 2015. This platform within the gallery aims to fill the gaps in the reception and publication of Hungarian neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde oeuvres by studying bodies of works and art phenomena previously treated as peripheral.
The gallery holds significant importance within the global art market, actively promoting its artists nationally as well as internationally and engaging in art fairs, such as the Art Basel in Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Frieze Masters London or the ARCO Madrid.
