be.more.contemporary
A remarkable public art exhibition
in cooperation with JCDecaux and Art Market Budapest
This exceptional arts program was born from the meeting of two partners committed to excellence, innovation, and imparting values.
In October 2021, large photographs of contemporary artworks, created with the professional participation of the international art market and exhibition Art Market Budapest, appears on prominent advertising spaces provided by JCDecaux in the central areas and busy transport hubs of Budapest. The resulting public exhibition will build a connection between contemporary art and the general public with extraordinary intensity and efficiency.
Particularly exciting is that the exhibition, spanning approximately 10 kilometers, depicts artworks that can also be viewed and purchased in their original form at the exhibition halls of Bálna Budapest during Art Market Budapest, from October 7-10, 2021.
This exemplary collaboration between one of the world’s major outdoor advertising agencies and the leading art fair in Central and Eastern Europe is making the proximity and enjoyment of contemporary art almost a part of everyday life, and easily accessible to hundreds of thousands.
The BE.MORE.CONTEMPORARY exhibition is working with galleries exhibiting at Art Market Budapest (Adrian Ibanez Galéria, Apteka Sztuki, Baker Howard Contemporary, Bel Art, Einspach Fine Art & Photography, Huntkastner, Photon, Quimera, Valid World, Várfok, Whiteconcepts, Zorzini) to present the works of the following artists: Omar Mendoza, Agnieszka Zawisza, Patrick Schmidt, Branka Jankovic Knezevic, Zoltán Tombor, Eva Kotkova, Dino Kuznik, Ana Clara Soler, Yamamoto Masao, Máté Orr, Julia Vegh, Dan Maciuca.
Adrián Ibáñez Galéria
Omar MENDOZA – Ocelote-refugio (2021)
oil on canvas
100 x 100 cms
Omar Mendoza, builds a new world from a symbolic relation. He takes the piano or some furniture as an
iconical image to propose new worlds full of vegetation that appears and grows immersed in magical realism:
associations and symbols, metaphors about the society and structure.
Apteka Sztuki
Agnieszka ZAWISZA – May (2019)
oil on canvas
140 x 110 cm
Agnieszka Zawisza is a painter, visual artist and art teacher. She studied at the Warsaw Art Academy, Department of Painting (1994-2000), obtaining a Master’s degree with honours in the year 2000. She recently obtained a PhD in the field of Fine Arts at the Łódź Art Academy. Oil painting is her most frequently used medium, but the artist also uses collage and other techniques on paper.
The painting “May” can be recognised as a landscape, but the artist chooses not to refer to it directly. A number of artistic actions on the canvas, where the paint is spilled, poured and applued in many ways, reflects the richnes of nature. The artist used oil colour on canvas in an array of green tones, with some direct reference to the natural world.
Baker Howard Contemporary
Patrick SCHMIDT – Twelve-Dreams (2021)
acrylic on canvas
24 x 24 cm
Patrick Schmidt creates ‘hardedge colour fields’ with a digital sensibility that explores the language of abstraction. Influenced by Op Art, Schmidt was born in the American Midwest where he worked with abstract shapes and forms to confront the world around him. He layers found patterns over one another in order to transform unique imagery into complex universal symbolism. His aggressive use of colour is frenzied and political, while his groovy, ridged patterns challenge our aesthetic prejudices. Optical transparency and mathematical geometry demand focus, yet require distraction at the same time. Schmidt’s work is a balance of harmony and chaos. A mirror of our times, it shows us who we are.
Bel Art
Branka JANKOVIC KNEŽEVIĆ – Joseph Beuys (1980)
ink wash – pencil
50×35 cm
Branka Jankovic Knežević s central topic of interest is the Persona, most commonly an individual who has left a profound impression on her life, as she says, an icon of her and our era, an intimate confession, as well as a generally acknowledged situation of modern civilization.. She approaches the subjects with unrestarined energy and often in a clear course of an even firmer synthesis of the form she founds the very essence of a person , his or her authentic character, temperament and meaning. Her devotion to a particular Persona os not only a search for he physiognomic facade of human form, but a way to to the discovery of the identity , ours as much as hers, and that of a mankind in general. She has chosen /dealing with paradigms of our just flown away XX th century like Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso or Joseph Beuys.
Einspach Fine Art & Photography
Zoltán TOMBOR – Light Theraphy (2021)
dibond
133 x 100 cm
Zoltán Tombor (1973) lives and works in Budapest. A self-taught photographer, he learnt the essentials in his teens, and has been a professional since 1995. Starting his career in Hungary, in 2003 he moved to Milan, working mostly on fashion, advertising and portrait commissions. In 2011 he relocated to New York City, photographing fashion for major magazines. In 2015 he launched his own annual publication, Supernation, which features his fashion and documentarian series. He is a member of the Association of Hungarian Photographers, the Hungarian Press Association, the International Center of Photography, New York, and the Professional Photographers of America. His most recent exhibition in Hungary, Homeward, was on view at Societé Budapest in 2019.
Huntkastner
Eva KOŤÁTKOVÁ – from the series Conference of Body Parts (2016)
collage
43 x 31cm
Inspired by surrealism Eva Kotatkova’s distinctive artistic vocabulary unites sculpture, text and performance. As metaphor of modern civilization her comprehensive work illustrates dreams, expectations and deals with mutual anxieties mainly experienced by children, elderly people and animals – the so-presumed weak of society to indicate the fragility of the subject facing maintained structures. She further explores the relationship between the private and personal on one hand and the public, authoritarian sphere on the other and their antagonistic relation constantly implying and questioning a sublime institutional critique beneath the surface.
Phonton
Dino KUZNIK – Another Era
photography
20 x 16 cm
In the series Shaped by the West, created between
2016 and 2019 on his several solo road trips
through the country, Dino Kužnik (1986, Slovenia)
portrays some of the most iconic symbols of the
American West; the car, the gas station, the road
and the landscape. Conceptually, the series stems
from the artist’s experience of the westernization
of Slovenia during the transition from socialism to
capitalism, after its independence in the 1990s. This
shifting atmosphere led to confusion over what was
archetypally Slovenian, which was, according to the
artist, felt most strongly by the young generation he
was part of. It was easier to identify with established,
westernized realms, especially in popular
culture. He grew up with American imagery and
values conveyed through television and film, with
the “great American spirit” communicated through
visually established symbols of the “most powerful
country in the world.” These, among other influences,
had a significant impact on his goals and
aspirations as an adult and, more importantly, on
his artistic endeavours.
Quimera
Ana Clara SOLER – Gato IV (2020)
watercolor on paper
70 x 50 cm
“I like the idea of producing art from the purest affirmation, from the expulsion and capture of
a particular and intimate universe that wants to be said and ignores the containment dikes of
taste and fashions, thus founding the space of a personal mythology. Collecting images,
concepts and palettes from everywhere, expanding the limits of one’s own style to the point
of questioning it, while an invisible current unifies everything and organizes it under the
imprint of a dreamy expressionism.
As time went by, the supports and forms in my works varied and mutated, but the source of
inspiration and the world that inspires me remained the same, that of literature, fiction,
rarefied and exuberant nature.” Ana Clara Soler
Valid World
Yamamoto MASAO – KAWA # 1684 (2016)
gelatin silver print + mixed media
23.5 x 16 cm
In his delicate black-and-white photographs, Masao Yamamoto tries to capture the harmonious details of life that most of us miss. He gained initial renown for his multi-part installations consisting of tea-stained, torn, and creased prints that, through their evocation of antiquity, encourage reflection on memory and the passage of time. More recently, the painter-turned-photographer has presented larger, though still subtle, single-framed prints of depopulated Japanese nature scenes, as in the series “Kawa=Flow” and “Shizuka=Cleanse”. In describing his quietly beautiful work, Yamamoto explains that he feels “the presence of many ‘treasures’ breathing quietly in nature,” which he tries to capture “with both my eyes and my camera.” He calls this presence “Shizuka,” meaning cleansed, pure, clear, and untainted.
Várfok Gallery
Máté ORR – Fight that is not really a fight (2021)
oil and acrylic on canvas
150 x 110 cm
Máté Orr (b. 1985, Veszprém) graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts’ Painting Department in 2011, which was immediately followed by his artistic debut in a series of Hungarian solo and group exhibitions. Orr’s paintings have been shown in several art fairs and exhibitions internationally, including Monaco, South-Korea, China, Germany, Slovakia, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Contrasts of the grotesque and harmonious, real and symbolic, naturalistically detailed and simplified are all to be found within his paintings. His scenes, emanating from a dark, homogenic background, have elements which reflect and draw upon paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, the hybrid characters of Hieronymus Bosch and the works of 20th. Century French Surrealists. Máté Orr has been a member of the permanent artist circle of the Várfok Gallery since 2019.
Whiteconcepts
Julia VEGH – Organic pink crystal (2020)
collage
34 x 22 cm
Following the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, the painting’s existence is justified by its own aesthetic beauty and is independent of any social conventions. The inner world is built from a dream world. By that the element of randomness appears, as well as the human body, the subjective inner relationship with nature and the importance of its closeness. In Julia Vegh’s works one can encounter visual motifs of space and non-space as well as the sacred and the profane, in contrasting conceptual pairs.
