Szabó Ádám: Smorgasbord - An exhibition connected to the program 'What's up?' of Kunsthalle
25 June 2008 – 1 August 2008Hypothesis is one of the most important determining factors of Ádám Szabó's works. He deals with assumptions influencing his sculptural and artistic thinking and activity. His questions and suppositions are connected to geographical, natural forms, living organisms, chemical or physical processes.
The nature of sculpture is determined by what the artist molds from a given material by physical transformation. Ádám Szabó realized that this feature can be observed not only in art, but also in natural environment, since the geographical transforming processes show similar results in the case of erosion, melting, deposition or any other phenomenon showing changes in form.
The artist's game with fiction begins where physics and chemistry end. The creator, relying on his observations, uses the natural reactions as sculptural methods, but places them in the human categories of humor and absurdity. His characteristic and elaborated works present situations, states and processes referring to questions beyond nature and art.
Ádám Szabó's hypnotic videos, photos and sculptures are not the ending points of a carving process, on the contrary, they state the arbitrary construction of shapes. His films played backwards capture transformations, where the cracked off stone thickens the sculpture instead of thinning it down, and his new woodworks place the practice of plastic surgery and his theory on beauty into the world of nature – he replaces the knots and gnarls of living trees with immaculate substitutions, corrects the flaws of fruits by sawing patches on them, and with all of these, he meditates on the meaning, usefulness and moral boundaries of sculpture.
His exhibition in Inda Gallery presents a selection of his works of the last few years. We can admire his newest wood and fruit corrections, as well as his mockumentary on the results of the pseudo-scientific examination of a Martian meteorite proliferating like living matter. The latter was recently screened in Jövő Háza.
Muladi, Brigittaart historian,curator of the exhibition
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