TAT  Contemporary Art Gallery

They say ”there is nothing new under the sun”, and over the course of art history, famous art historians and artists have claimed – it is enough to think of Kazimir Malevich – that it was the end of art. TAT Gallery wished to get to the bottom of this question when it announced the call for artists under the title MÁSKÉPP. (’Másképp’ means ’otherwise’ or ’in a different way’, meanwhile ’kép’ means ’picture’. in Hungarian) As the title hints at it, we were curious how our contemporary artists would reinterpret significant works of art history. Amongst the submitted artworks, there are interpretations painted with the sensitivity and precision of Renaissance painters but also paraphrases abstracted to the very minimum, often carried out with a great sense of humor. Through the ample material of the exhibition, we will attempt to show that even though the original statement is somewhat true, and one can actually think, looking through the broad array of works of art history, giving each no more than a cursory glance, that they ”have already seen everything”, and all the themes have already been elaborated on a hundred times, yet each and every piece of art is irreproducible and in its uniqueness, it can always give something new to the curious and open-minded spectator.

Anna Voelgyi