Société Réaliste - The first five-year plan, detail.
Active from 2004 to 2014, Société Réaliste was an art cooperative that developed lines of art research and production in a methodical manner. It raided its raw material from diverse territories, including political design, graffiti hermeneutics, calendar insurrections, zombie typography, cartographic extravaganza or architectural psychosis. Its exhaustive approach to the function of art was organized according to rigorous as well as aberrant protocols. This systemic inflexibility was constructed according to a five-year plan (2004-2008), a temporal pile of work, shovels of which were shown in the form of exhibitions in the churches of art.
Like all good five-year plans, it failed tremendously. Société Réaliste therefore launched a second five-year plan (2009-2014), which was able to fail by the power of two. After all, from the very beginning, the cooperative only cared about the scraps left over by its production lines. Mattered the anarchistic expansion of its interstices and the epileptic light shed by the anomalies it generated. These obstructive residues sabotaged the art-making machine and constitute today a swarming and deformed archive, which will welcome the public from 14 pm to 6 pm, every day except Mondays and Weekends.
Schedule
The exhibition is the first attempt, since 2014, for a retrospective presentation focusing on the collective’s work. It showcases seminal pieces, such as Limes New Roman (2009), MARKA (2008), Greater Europe (2007), and Empire of Soviets (2010), but also less know works such as Polisteries (2007), the Ministère de l’Architecture series (2006-) or Monosoliton (2007), that constitute together the alphabet of Société Réaliste’s conceptual practice. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital compilation of texts, correspondences and definitions that the duo has gathered during their research and that is available for reading online below.
Société Réaliste (2004-2014) is a Paris-based artists' cooperative founded in 2004 by Ferenc Gróf (1972) and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (1982). Their practice explores, subverts and deconstructs the devices of visual communication that have been developed and employed by power structures in the fields of religion, politics, culture, art and finance. Examining these agencies – logos, maps, symbols, typefaces, landmarks, emblems, statues or even buildings – in complex contexts of space and time, the artists elaborate “political cabinet of curiosities” through a critical, narrative implementation and investigation of political design. Société Réaliste's work has been shown at numerous international venues such as the Biennale de Lyon (2009), the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2011), the Ludwig Museum Budapest (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest (2012), the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (2012), the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center in New York (2012), and the MUSAC León (2012) among others.
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.
