Ákos Birkás - What was yet to come

Opening: Wednesday, May 8, 2019

May 9, 2019 - June 8, 2019

  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 70x180 cm. Courtesy of Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy of Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Untitled, oil on canvas, 45x30 cm. Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 2 parts, 100x200 cm and 60x180 cm. Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Exhibition: What was yet to come, Courtesy of Knoll Gallery Vienna and Budapest
  • on the left: Ákos Birkás, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 80x100 cm | on the right: Ákos Birkás, Beschädigtes Bild - Ostkuntst, 2015, oil on canvas, 80x100 cm. Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest
  • Ákos Birkás, Untitled, 2018, 7 watercolors on paper, each 29,5x21 cm. Courtesy Knoll Galerie Wien und Budapest

In Ákos Birkás’ art work series titled Damaged image (exhibition The totality and the rest, 2016) abstract and realistic approaches appeared as counteractive phenomena. In this exhibition Birkás articulated social tensions as well as confrontations between the individual and the social media, and reflected on the complexity of these issues. Birkás painted pure abstract and geometrical forms, which he then intentionally damaged with the figurative representation of a male face, which resembles his own and could be interpreted as artist’s self-portrait. The role of this male figure, which is usually positioned in the corner of the painting, is to damage the abstract geometrical form and to critique and ironize the strong position that abstraction still holds in the art historical canon.
Inherent to these art works is the ambivalent development and incorporation of the abstract and realist figures. These self-portraits cannot be interpreted as mere self-portraits but rather as artist’s risk-takings. Birkás identified with interchangeable situations in the art world and created new artistic positions. In his self-portrait in a cross-structure, which he borrowed from Ilya Chashnik – a suprematist artist and a pupil of Kazimir Malevich – his facial expression “[is] provocative, overbold and tries to generate discussion” (as Birkás wrote in his diary). This very portrait does not just have a reflective nature on contemporary issues due to its connection to the radical spirituality and social utopia of the classic Russian avant-garde but is also a memento of Birkás’ way of thinking; “I considered the self-portrait an icon, the tautological end point of portraiture.”

His latest works from 2018, which are in the focus of the upcoming exhibition What was yet to come in the Knoll Gallery Vienna, follow the above mentioned line of thought, which was, due to the absence of time to work and create further, partially stopped or went in a different direction. At the same time, the exhibited art works are concerned with the ambivalent nature of figural and abstract entities and can be seen as a whole universe of constantly and mutually present and independent pictorial worlds.
Focusing on the most recent works of Birkás, created before his death in the summer of 2018, the exhibition What was yet to come, as its title suggests, while presenting the described ambivalent dynamics of his late phase, positions the art works as a starting point for an upcoming discussion and exploration of the art of Birkás and tries to imagine the line of creation and further development that would happen, if the artist was still alive.
In this late phase of his, Birkás returned to his origins, schematized symbol of head, but also literally turned his head away from the abstract painting and proposed a certain critique of it, which emerges from the within of his artworks and could be read as a form of self-critique too.

In contrast to Birkás’ series of damaged, contested  images, the exhibition includes a series consisting of 7 watercolours that represent the above mentioned characteristic so typical of Birkás -  an outline of a head, which is repeated in all of the 7 watercolours. These images are very symbolic in their ontological sense, as they point to something that has already passed but also through the use of bright tones and vivid brush strokes to something that is about to come. It is in this compulsive repetition that we can read two notions that interplay with each other in the exhibition -  the notion of time passing by and the artist’s drive to constantly create and load the open space with images.

What was yet to come is a review and an ode to the art of Ákos Birkás and could be regarded as a representation of a finished cycle of artist’s life, starting with symbolical, to his art primordial, watercolours, continuing through the exploration of the damaged image and closing with the (self)portraits of an old man with a still and melancholic facial expression that is like a shadow emerging from or, better said, diving into the pictorial background.

Ákos Birkás’ complex oeuvre will be maintained by the co-operation between the Ákos Birkás Artistic Foundation and the Knoll Gallery Vienna and Budapest.
The exhibition was realized with the participation of Erzsébet Pilinger, Edit Sasvári, Renáta Szikra, Krisztina Szipőcs and Gábor Szolláth.