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SIX REVELATIONS OF THE MAD GALLERY GUARD 

An exhibition by Balázs Kicsiny

2B Gallery, Budapest

January 4. – 26.   2024.

The exhibition of Balázs Kicsiny reconstructs the gradual liquidation and sudden fall into ruins of a no-one-visited picture gallery. The procedure leading to this collapse is presented by paintings based on the pictorial testimony of the guard of the fallen-into-ruins picture gallery. The aftermath of the collapse, which did not stop at the picture gallery’s collapsed walls but spread out and caused irreversible transformations in the peoples’ life of the region, presented by a collection of documents, taken from tabloid news. The exhibition also features a monument of the Mad Gallery Guard, as a commemoration of all those who witnessed the inexplicable events following the collapse of the Picture Gallery. The exhibition set these events in a Time and Space when and where an unknown/well-known political formation exercises power.

Balázs Kicsiny’s exhibition at the 2B Gallery is an inaugural event of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts.  

The exhibition will be open by Péter Forgács media artist. on the 3rd of January 2024 at 6 p.m.

 

 

CORPSE CALL 

Exhibition by BALÁZS KICSINY

Fészek Artist's Club Gallery, Budapest

April 20th - July 8th 2023

Balázs Kicsiny invites us to cruentation in the Artists' Club, opening up not just one, but a crypt-worth of tombs: Baron Henry Carey's checkered sarcophagus, source of infection for the contagious »checkered doubt«, Malevich's suprematist grave with the Black Square, the tomb of Imre Nagy, buried with the Kádár regime as well as that of János Kádár's 56 (without skull), who buried Imre Nagy with the revolution. Or even (with Yorick's skull) Hamlet's father, returning as a vengeful ghost. Derrida started his hauntological program with Hamlet exactly thirty years ago to summon Fukuyama to cruentation and confront neoliberalism, which envisaged the end of history, with the spectres of open-ended futures and unfinished pasts. Kicsiny uses the age-old furniture of the Fészek as a trauma medium to evoke its ghosts from the deepest strata of the artists' club and make them confess in a spectropolitical séance. But they interrogate and protect each other, talk to and conceal each other in this uncanny construction, until we understand that it is the corpse that is calling us in this cruentation, that what is at stake is not the past but the future, and we are the ones who have to confess, since, as Derrida stated, »the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself, or pay attention is a spectator as such.

 

Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács

Üzemzavar – Lábjegyzet az időhúzáshoz
Kicsiny Balázs kiállítása

2021. szeptember 7 - október 30.
 

“Kicsiny Balázs terében úgy lehet jelen a közönség, mintha csak egy közönséges épületben járna. Más szemszögből viszont a néző egy nagyobb léptékű sakkjátszma részének látszik, s mintha mozgását a Kicsiny művészetében korábban oly sokszor felbukkant, itt azonban – csaknem teljesen – hiányzó bábuk néznék valahonnan, titokban. Sarkaiból kifordult a világ, mintha egy stabilnak hitt pontjától lassan elfordult volna, s korábbi állapotai csak ismerős-ismeretlen jelek, új összefüggésekbe átemelt negatív képek vagy töredékes folyamatábrák révén idézhetők meg”

Megnyitó: 2021.09.07. / Artus – Kapcsolótér 19.00 / Megnyitotta: Mélyi József

Anchor 1

Time-Wasting

Exhibition by Balázs Kicsiny

 

MODEM, Debrecen

 

Exhibition opening: 14th November 2020. - 22nd August 2021.

 

Balázs Kicsiny’s constant play between tragedy and comedy saved him from the monotonous unquestionability and one-dimensionality of linear (life) paths. Taking a step back from reality, he finds tranquillity in his self-created, burlesque situations and in the unique inner world of the furtive figures in his artworks. Not for a single minute, however, has he ever diverted his observant gaze from the world outside.

Balázs Kicsiny has always been spurred into action by the desire for intellectualliberation and by the traversal of borders. Absurdity and the juxtaposition of incongruities are the most fundamental starting points in his works. He transposes stories from their original time and context, takes situations and events from scattered places, and interweaves them on new surfaces. First he breaks the narratives down into their basic components, then he distorts, reshapes, multiplies and mixes these fragments to invent original situations. From his observations of the world, he takes certain elements from reality, absorbs and processes them, and reassembles them into improbable creations, which he then reintroduces into the real world in a radically different form, place and time. This is a process of constant transformation, complex and diverse,and always results in polyphonic art, so that all of Balázs Kicsiny’s works could be read and interpreted in a multitude of ways.

The most important point of departure, which is the foundation of every single work of his, is an “anthropoid template”. The human body, as a form, is a melting pot of disparate parts, an “assemblage” of physical, mental and intellectual components. Kicsiny remodels and adapts these basic template figures, and dresses them up in different ways, instilling ever different content and meaning into them: a burlesque conglomeration of biographical, literary, historical, art historical, film historical, and philosophical elements.

Balázs Kicsiny’s figures are timeless and ageless. We cannot tell how old they are, where or when they were born, where they have travelled, which regions they have called home. They display no emotion, for they have no face and no gaze, and their postures are reduced to extremes. The figures are unknowable, free from all pathos and drama, redolent of the absurdity and solemnity in Buster Keaton’s world. The aim is for the viewer not to see another person, but to sense a being, an embodiment of “something”: a human situation, a problem, a concept, a thought, a sentiment, a life circumstance that the beholder can relate to. Kicsiny’s beings are concepts concealed as figures, objectivised sensations. There is always a chasm, however, that separates the viewer from the anthropomorphous being. It is important that all of Balázs Kicsiny’s beings are humanesque, so that viewers may feel that they too could do what the beings in front of them are doing, although actually they could not, because the beings are just pretending to do what they are doing, without moving at all. In every case, what we are presented with is the conflict between action and the inability to act (the compulsion to act). In every case, the works are about existence (possibilities of existence), not about the figures, not about people. Figures and people simply pass through (lead us through) the situations of different ages.

(excerpt from the catalogue written by Kinga Bódi, the curator of Time-wasting)

The exhibition catalogue can be bought from the hungarian National Gallery Museum shop https://muzeumshop.com/kicsiny-balazs-idohuzas

 

the MODEM: http://www.modemart.hu/katalogus/idohuzas/ 

or from Írok boltja https://www.irokboltja.hu/?t=productoverview&kod=11208452 

For review coverage and articles about the exhibition, please see the following:

https://blokmagazine.com/the-most-memorable-year-highlights-of-2020/ 

https://magyarnarancs.hu/kepzomuveszet/szakralis-burleszk-234391

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