Balázs Beöthy, Ivan Bura, Péter Császar, János Fodor, Andrea Huszár,Tibor Iski Kocsis, Csaba Nemes,
Ana Opalic, Matko Vekic

Curators: Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Gallery of Extended Media,
Zagreb 10 - 30 June 2004

Ecology Pavilion Mile End Park, London 20 May - 6 June 2004

Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaújváros 16 January - 13 February 2004

The group exhibition Unframed Landscapes offers a reassessment of landscape as a genre in contemporary art. The conventional understanding of landscape implies a picturesque view of the countryside - images of ruined castles, a lonely tree in the puszta and romantic seaside villages come to mind. This understanding of landscape has, however, been revealed as culturally-constructed, the product of political ideologies, and conveying human domination over nature. Furthermore, landscape is perceived through a frame by a distant spectator, who remains alienated from the object of his gaze. Nature as a theme in contemporary art acts as a barometer of our ecological attunement.

The exhibition Unframed Landscapes researches our relationship with nature across the full range of current media, including: landscapes painted from train windows, video photography exploring gender and landscape, computer animation researching images of a natural phenomenon on the web, digital snaps expressing the marginality of nature in city life, and physical interventions in the natural environment. The participating artists are Balázs Beöthy, Ivan Bura, Péter Császar, János Fodor, Andrea Huszár, Tibor Iski Kocsis, Csaba Nemes, Ana Opalic and Matko Vekic.

Works

János Fodor’s work 26 Frames is a mosaic of images that explore the fragmentisation of nature in urban culture. The artist’s camera captures it on travel advertisements, reflected on cars, framed by city signs, or arranged in shop windows. This work offers an unframed approach that reveals the marginal position of nature in contemporary urban living.

Bálazs Beöthy’s On the Rainbow Around the Globe is an animation loop made up of hundreds of pictures of the rainbow projected in quick succession. All the images were garnered from the Web in an act of artistic research into the real contents of global culture. This work comments on the prolific production of amateur landscape photography and plays on the shared experience of a natural phenomenon with deep roots in myth and popular belief that connect people everywhere.

The body of work of Péter Császár extends over almost two decades and consists of an archive of illegally built treehouses and towers on the outskirts of Budapest. Although his buildings were regularly destroyed by the authorities, the artist kept finding new sites and starting anew with material gathered around it. Out of thirty treehouses only a handful still remain, symbolically sharing the fate of the forest.

The work of Ivan Bura, Archeologic, is carried out in various media and conceived as a process. Common to his previous practice, he combines installation, photography and performance to talk about the burning issues people face in the countries of the region in the wake of globalisation. His work is charged with a sense of impending catastrophe, as well as the possibility for change, without excluding humour.

The landscapes of Csaba Nemes are painted from the raised perspective of the train window, and make us aware of our common experience of nature as something that we pass by when travelling. These painted back gardens and edges of the field represent neglected views of nature. His conceptual paintings question the status of landscape in contemporary art.

Matko Vekic is best known for large canvases of cars, bulldozers, motorway flyovers, and other urban scenes that draw attention to consumerism and megacities. Here he deals directly with the contemporary landscape, in work the dark vision of which recalls the destructive impact of human intervention on nature. The Modernist grid appears superimposed on clouds and mountain, but Nature exceeds the frame.

Ana Opalic presents six video photographs that show an identical forest scene shot near Dubrovnik at different times of day and in different weather conditions. This work, entitled I do not see, problematises the relationship of gender and landscape. The path, which vanishes in the geometric centre of the picture, denotes perspective as a tool for achieving mastery over nature. Referring to the invisible in the title, this work highlights what is excluded from the conventional frame of vision.

Andrea Huszár makes frequent use of natural materials for her sculptures. Snapshot is made from stones collected from the Danube and fresh roses. The stones, shaped by the river flow, and the gentle flower petals, suggest irreducible qualities in nature. In this minimal piece, our attention is also drawn to spatial relationships within the flattened visual field.

The paintings in Tibor Iski Kocsis’s Eco Tourism series depict natural elements such as wheat, forest, sky and earth. They are painted in a photo realistic style in compositions that slip out from the frame of the canvas. Genetic Medium is based on a snap taken early on the first day of the new millennium. It is a close up of a frozen, ploughed field, with the cold sun rays reflecting back, carrying the feeling of uncertainty symptomatic of our age.

Nature in Contemporary Art (essay)

http://www.galerijabalen.net/unframed