IMPACT: ABSTRACTION & EXPERIMENT IN HUNGARIAN PHOTOGRAPHY
May 10 – June 18, 2016 I Vernissage: May 7, 6-9pm Finissage: June 18, 6-8pm Venue: Alma Gallery I 625 W. 27th Street, New York Hours: 12 — 7pm
“Impact: Abstraction & Experiment in Hungarian Photography” includes 21 modern and contemporary artists. It juxtaposes Moholy-Nagy’s photograms and photo-collages with early examples by György Kepes and Tihamér Gyarmathy (1915-2005), as well as the novel approaches of Dezső Szabó and Balázs Sprenc. Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with new media is evident is his remarkable color film, “Light Machine” (1941), and it is echoed in Theodor Kraynik’s “Video Luminar” (1967), a pioneering video that will premier at Alma following its recent restoration. Equally inventive is Monochrome Clack’s eponymous installation, which features projection over a mosaic of modified black-and-white photographs, with a music mix by by Kinga Kovács a.k.a. DJ Sanyi. Ádám Magyar uses a scanner as a camera, taking radically elongated photographs of commuters in trains. Szacsva y Pál photographs projections onto objects, blurring the real and the represented. József Hajdú made contact prints from thick, plastic, emulsion-coated X-Ray sheets, which sound technicians at Hungarian Radio re-used to cut records, due to the shortage of material in Hungary during the 1930s. Gábor Kerekes’s view of photography, as an alchemical juncture between art and science, led him to explore a wide variety of techniques and subjects, including his drone’s-eye-view anthracotypes of Roswell and Secret Area 51, places where fact and fiction, present and future, seem to meld.
MODERNITY X HUNGARY, New York, USA
