Tamás Fuchs: Millefiori | Exhibition Opening

Exhibition Opening by Ágnes Bihari, art writer and photographer

Tamás Fuchs’s current exhibition is built from fragmented narrative threads. The mosaic-like images—though seemingly sourced from different worlds—do not depict a single moment or event. These fragments have emerged from works created over the past twenty years, yet their themes and stories span centuries and continents. A pair of urns from the Qianlong dynasty, a Murano glass chalice crafted with millefiori technique, the Apollo spacecraft, a portrait of Roger Moore by Lake Balaton, or a solitary OxyContin pill: each of these is a microcosm, located at the intersection of desire, unattainability, and memory.

If we stack these partially filled timelines atop one another, a kind of self-portrait of the artist begins to emerge: that of a collector who knows he cannot possess all the objects of his longing, and so he tries to draw them closer through painting. Just as in Karl May’s Winnetou, Old Shatterhand stuffs the drawn image of the Indian chief into the barrel of his rifle, saying, “Your soul is now here in the barrel of my gun,” so too does Tamás Fuchs’s brush become an instrument for the illusion of possession. What cannot be bought can be painted—and through depiction, a fragment of the soul of the desired form may be claimed.

The figures in these paintings appear alone. The millefiori chalice sometimes seems doubled, yet it is, in truth, a single object—perhaps just carrying a dual personality. The lonely Z-key on a keyboard is useless on its own: without the Control key, there is no undo. The solitary OxyContin pill evokes the dark shadow of America’s opioid crisis: a pill is rarely alone—its companions are never far behind. Alone it promises happiness, in numbers it brings demise. The Apollo spacecraft briefly takes on the face of a panda—pareidolia: we see human or animal features even where none exist. Though the bear face may seem cute at first, the machine's body remains just as alone in space as Simon Templar might feel on the shore of Lake Balaton.

The chromatic aberration glimmering along the contours of Fuchs’s painted forms, the valör—those faint tonal shifts that color atmospheric distance—and the flickering afterimages all trace that uncertain, trembling line where longing and eternal distance collide. Anthropomorphism—the urge to find human form and feeling in inanimate things—haunts every piece: chalice, urn, key, and spacecraft, all cast into their own isolated universes.

The works in Millefiori thus come together as a single composition: a mosaic made of a thousand flowers that speaks, ultimately, of solitude.

The exhibition is on view from July 9 to August 8, 2025, during regular gallery hours.