Budapest Gallery shows ʼGaze of Thoughtʼ

Screenshot from a videoloop entitled ‘From A to S and back’ made by Miklós Gaál in 2012.

“The key question around which the art of Miklós Gaál and Tibor iski Kocsis revolves is the situation of reality and its relationship to representation, or, more precisely, the role of experience and perception in the artistic creation of reality,” the organizers say. This exhibition presents the answers the artists have given to the aforementioned question.

Miklós Gaál experiments with photography, video, and installation art as a means with which to examine the interrelationships between the object depicted and the depiction itself, contemplating the elements of reality, which seem to have settled in an entirely incidental manner, as an outside observer. The situations and scenes which appear in his works present interconnections among elements of everyday life and the surroundings which guide the viewer to completely new and unusual interpretations, almost as if reframing familiar spectacles.

The essential problem of the art of Tibor iski Kocsis is similar to that of Gaál’s. He deals with the interrelationships between the object and existence. Since his art is conceptual in its foundations, his works have an ideational background, though his carefully composed and boldly painted-sketched pictures never relinquish any of the expressive power of the sensual spectacle, the press release says. 

The theme of the works, which are made using an array of techniques (oil-on-canvas paintings, pastel, charcoal and pencil drawings, screen prints, photography, offset prints), is nature as a reality without humans and yet created by humans. In his works on display in this exhibition, iski Kocsis is concerned with the depiction of the whole of nature, from outer space and the moon to the slenderest blade of grass. 

The exhibition installation reminds us that, whatever detail of the natural world we happen to observe, whether living or lifeless, we are always observing a single whole, which always acquires its meaning from its relationship to the human.