Survey | Gábor Áron Gábor exhibition

Áron Gábor (1954) has been working as a painter, graphic artist, sculptor and performer since the early 1980s, but his presence in contemporary art is also emphasized through his installations and video works. His works, which distinctively combine elements of different systems, are created with visual complexity, summarising experience and giving space to multiple layers of meaning.

In the first room of the exhibition, the earliest works are presented, which were born in the 1980s - at the beginning of the heyday of installation and performance art, video and computer art in Hungary - around the themes of Questioning and Animals, born out of a desire to question, contemplate and learn.

Born in the 1990s, during the long period of regime change in Hungary, Heads, together with the cat drawings as a symbol of freedom and the characters in the video of the performance entitled "The Question" (1990), surround us in the central space of the exhibition almost as witnesses. Another performance video, House of Europe (1990), was another attempt to understand change and the meaning of belonging to Europe.

The series Eyes in the Mirror (2020), created during the pandemic, links the ideas that have been swirling around Heads and the Inside(s) with the most recent works from the last two years.

The unity of thought and the sharpening of vision inspired the necessarily decomposed images of the Part and Whole series, which aim to capture the ever-changing macro- and microcosm. Vibrant and harmonious even in their stillness, the compositions, mostly in pencil and chalk, are a complement of abstract and geometric forms, and thanks to their multilayering and the absence of a definable centre dominating the plane, they also appear as an imprint of exceptional moments of reception.