György Szőnyei: Squares

"When Malevich created his painting Black Square in 1915, he also created the first pixel. This seemingly bold statement goes far beyond the significance of suprematism and indicates its mechanisms of influence on the future. Malevich's Cubist innovation is analogous to Piet Mondrian's Composition with Two Lines (1931), a work that shows the smallest, indivisible but still interpretable element of the universe, where two perpendicular lines placed in a square at the apex of the canvas create tension. The pixel is the smallest editable element in the digital imaging grid, first defined in 1965 by Frederic C. Billingsley as the constituent element of images of the Moon and Mars from space probes.

The classical Malevich square and the Mondrian square at its apex - and the much more liberated Broadway boogie-woogie composition of 1942-43 - as well as the concepts of the computer-generated pixel and the self-designed fonts based on his own artistic foundations, are the main cornerstones of György Szőnyei's art. It is from these elementary units that the works on display in the Kunsthalle's #Box Squares exhibition are composed, where we use the fonts he designed in the exhibition space and in the accompanying publication.

A graduate in applied graphics from the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts, Szőnyei became associated with the new sensationalism and new eclecticism movements in the 1980s. The artist, who was also involved in fine art, graphic design, type design and teaching to an outstanding standard and with equal enthusiasm, has a fine blend of different fields in his oeuvre, with typographic challenges following the geometric order, sacred and profane themes. He works in ink, ink-pen, tempera, acrylic and computer; he also creates collages and ready-made works. His works, now on display, were created in the 1980s and are based on a strict order, and are in the grand tradition of geometric abstraction, entering into a discourse with his computer-generated, colour-rich lettering designs and posters, which are now made of real pixels from the early 2000s, and which perpetuate the same traditional order as his hand-painted, meticulously rendered works, composed of clean, and therefore upright or inverted squares."

Réka Fazakas

curator of the exhibition