MÁRTON NEMES: TECHNO ZEN
The exhibition of the Hungarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale of Art, featuring older and new works
At the Venice Biennale 2024, Ludwig Museum presented the exhibition Techno Zen by Márton Nemes.
The visual, acoustic and interactive content of the multimedia, multi-sensory project unfolded through the combined effects of light and colour, object and light movement, sound, light frequency and airflow. The project, conceived as an immersive environment, a Gesamtkunstwerk based on painting, exemplifies the expansion of the genre of painting, increasingly characteristic of the artist’s creative method, to other media.
Márton Nemes’ work is strongly influenced by techno subcultures, and the dismantling and rearrangement of the pictorial field gives his paintings a distinctive psychedelic character, which extends across abstract realms and evokes the visual and light atmospheres of today’s nightclubs. Combining elements of painting and sculpture, his paintings and multimedia installations create a hypnotic spatial dynamic that sucks the viewer out of the harshness of the real world and into a fluid, dizzying colour field.
The term techno also refers to techne, or technological art: combining industrial technologies and materials with a more traditional approach, Nemes creates object paintings, installations and moving painting environments. Laser-cut steel, car paint, enamelled steel, projection, DMX lights, speakers and coloured fans reinterpret the scope of painting. The resulting environment becomes multisensory: its optical, acoustic and haptic content unfolds through the combined effects of light, colour, movement and sound.
In the Budapest exhibition, the artworks from Venice will be complemented by a selection of the artist’s works from the last ten years, whose themes and technical solutions can be seen as a precursor of the project presented at the Biennale.
Márton Nemes (1986, Székesfehérvár) studied industrial design at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, then continued his studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where he studied painting between 2008 and 2013. In 2018 he received his Master’s degree from Chelsea College of Arts, London. In 2019 he was awarded the Esterházy Art Award and one of his works was purchased by the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art. He has participated in international group exhibitions, including “Haunting Monumentality” at MSU Zagreb (2014), “Falling Out of the Rhythm” at BWA Warsaw (2019), “Abstract Hungary” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz (2017), “Place Value – New Acquisitions” at Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art (2022) and “New Mediations” at MODEM Debrecen (2022). He lives and works in New York and Budapest.
20 December 2024 – 8 March 2025
Curator: Róna Kopeczky
