Rain Come Down! – Domesticated environments – the Hungarian attitudes: Zsófi Barabás, László Hatházi, Tibor Iski Kocsis, Hajnalka Tarr, Kata Tranker, Zsofia Szemzo

Curated by Zsolt Petrányi

Rain Come Down! – Domesticated environments – the Hungarian attitudes

Zsófi Barabás, László Hatházi, Tibor Iski Kocsis, Hajnalka Tarr, KataTranker, Zsófia Szemző

curated by Zsolt Petrányi

z2o Sara Zanin Gallery is pleased to present Rain ComeDown! – Domesticated environments – the Hungarian attitudes, a group show curated by Zsolt Petrányi featuring works by Zsófi Barabás, László Hatházi, Tibor Iski Kocsis, Hajnalka Tarr, KataTranker, ZsófiaSzemző.

The exhibition deals with how humans relate themselves to their environment. This environment can be natural, political, historical, or the urban landscape. The approach is a global phenomenon, a shifting paradigm that involves artists elaborating their relationship with their references, the artistic context or the life what is given to them by the circumstances they are born into. The „background” is not chosen, but defined by where we come from, what perspectives and developments are rooted in the places we come from. The title, Rain Come Down! is expressing an active will to control happenings, to overcome natural and civilised processes by artistic practices - in original, I found this line in an American rap-song.
Hungarian art such a metaphor describes different kind of creative behaviour approaches such as the re-using of media materials, memories, historical traumas, maps, photographs or everyday motives. The part of Europe where Hungary is located has a ever present history because of the changes of the near past. Not just the change of the governmental system in 1989, when the socialistic states started their slow development to liberal capitalism and democracy, or the extension of the United Europe, but also the recent shock of the wave of immigrants, who have been using our countries and a transit zone towards the rich countries of Europe. The influx of mass migration has put the mid-generation in a conflicted situation. The career opportunities related to the flow of information and the freedom to travel is contradicted by growing nationalism within states and the support for right wing ideologies.  
The artists have different political ideologies despite been from nearly the same generation. Even the last 40 years of Hungarian art history brought different important trends from conceptualism to new expressivity of paintings, the artists starting their career after the millennium  are facing with the dilemma what this unity of the European countries or the mixing of religious ideologies will bring to our societies. The question turns them inwards to find solutions by the analysis of their own environ, or to feel consciousness on questions of general issues like the growth of urban population or the symbiosis with nature or different ethnics.

Zsolt Petrányi

Artists

Zsófi Barabás
1980, lives and works in Budapest
Zsófi Barabás graduated from the University of Arts in Budapest in 2004,she continued her DLA program in Pécs, Janus Pannonius University. She received her postgraduate degree in Tokyo University of Arts in 2009. Spent her Erasmus in Darmstadt. Got scholarship of the city of Frankfurt in the Atelier of Frankfurt in 2013, and the Hungarian Academy of Rome in 2014.
Barabás combines oil surfaces and as well as graphic elements in her painting. In her work, the lines and the colourful surfaces create special characteristic composition. Her light, atmospheric images area combination of flat, spatial, and linear surface oriented solutions. Her new works have been developed by a starting motif, a map detail, what seems to be a creative inspiration to follow personal drive to express psychological constructions through the nets and arrangements of lines.

László Hatházi
1978, lives and works in Budapest.
Laszlo Hathazi graduated from the University of Arts in Budapest in 2003. Then went onto a DLA degree in Pécs (Hungary)Janus Pannonius University in 2009. After which he received the Derkovits grant between 2008 and 2011, and the Strabag Prize in 2008.
Hatházi’s work analysis the everyday environment, from the point of view of the “Home”, our co-existence with botanical artefacts and animals. His interest is to combine patterns, sign like details and surfaces to compositions. His arrangements are balancing between reality and imaginary visions. The variety of techniques and materials displays the same interest in different outlook and effect.

Tibor Iski Kocsis
1972, lives and works in Budapest.
Tibor Iski Kocsis graduate from the University of Arts in Budapest in 2001. He then received the Derkovits Grant between 2004-2007 and the Strabag Prize in 2002. He received the scholarship from the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 2003, and the Scholarship of Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart in 2005.
Iski Kocsis is following the conceptual tradition be redefining and reinterpreting painting. Since 2007, he has been making "nature paintings", following the journey from the artificial or organic natural scene through to the atelier, ending up on the walls of exhibition space. Thus he reinterprets the genre of landscape, picturing the vision with different mediums (photographs, paintings, drawings and video).

Hajnalka Tarr
1977, lives and works in Budapest.
HajnalkaTarr graduated from the University of Arts in Budapest in 2006, where she continued her DLA studies recently. Between 2008 and 2009, she got the Derkovits Scholarship. Tarr participated in the 2010 Krinzinger Project, the residency program in Petőmihályfa, Hungary, of the Krinzinger Gallery in Vienna. Tarr received the Gruber Award in 2006.
Tarr’s works are sensitive medial transformations of conceptual ideas to images. Her freedom to work with different tools and materials also orientates her to redefine the painting as classical medium. Her cut outs photographs based works combined with pencil works shows philosophical analyses of objects like books, artworks or landscape views. Her solution to reveal the secrets of an object leads through to desacralize them by her “decollage” and remounting technique.

Kata Tranker
1989, lives and works in Budapest
Kata Tranker graduated from the University of Art in Budapest in 2012. Spending the Erasmus Scholarship in Hamburg in 2009.
Tranker is member of the youngest generation of artists who dedicated her activity to the paper as a medium. Her approach is not based on the traditional techniques, but interferes to the picturing process by constructing dimensional box like, multi-layered artworks. Her pieces are often collage like objects, including cut outs and photographs, referring to memory, history and the reshaping of the past by artistic intervention.  

Zsófia Szemző
1982, lives And works in Budapest.
Zsofia Szemző graduated from the MOME University of Arts And Design in 2011, and her DLA studies in 2013 at the University of Arts in Budapest.  She lived in Paris between 2008-2012 and received the Eötvös Scholarship in 2010,  and the Klára Herceg junior prize in 2012.
Szemző’s work explores the complexity of storytelling where the personal memory, the past and present environment are mixed up and transferred to surrealistic images. Her medium is paper, which she uses mostly to draw on and sometimes creates montages. Her way of exhibiting involves this combination by making map like arrangements of the images.

Curator

Zsolt Petrányi
1966, lives and works in Budapest.
After completing art historical studies, he became curator of contemporary arts in the Műcsarnok /Kunsthalle Budapest from 1996. His interest was the young, upcoming art of the nineties of Hungary. Later he organized international projects when worked as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts  in Dunaújváros, an industrial city near to Budapest. During this period he was the curator of the controversial show of the group Little Warsaw in Venice Biennial Hungarian Pavilion(2003, The Body of Nefertity). From 2005 till 2011 he became director of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest, where he focused on big scale international solo and group exhibitions as own productions of the institution(Luc Tuymans, Michael Boremans, Thomas Ruff, etc.). From 2011 till now he is the head of contemporary arts in the Hungarian National Gallery and teaches art management in the International Business School, in Budapest.