KEREKES studied conservation in Belgrade. In the 1970s, he became a leading figure of the Vojvodina neo-avant-garde, and in 1988 he emigrated to West Berlin. He participated in the exhibitions of the Bosch+Bosch group in Vojvodina from 1970, was a member of the group from 1972 to 1974, and was co-editor and graphic designer of the avant-garde journal Új Symposion. The subject matter of his works from the 1970s is the trace, the mark, the imprint, the relief-like representation in the spirit of land art. In the middle of the decade, he left the Bosch+Bosch group and turned to painting. In his landscape experiments, he created “corrections”/visual marks in the dryed bottom of the Palić Lake near Subotica; he placed numbers and lines oriented according to coordinates in the natural environment. He introduced foreign objects, elements, strips of paper into the landscape interpreted as a set of signs; in the action shots, the endless, fragmented lake bed reminds us of a lunar landscape, in which the image of the lonely artist floating strips of paper and leaving trails of lime might recall frames from a utopian film. There is an interesting similarity between the landscape interventions of Kerekes and the members of Bosch+Bosch and the Pécs Workshop (1968–80) in Hungary. The neo-avant-garde art collectives on both sides of the border knew each other’s works and their members were in personal contact and guest exhibitions were organised by mutual invitation. Almost all the members of Bosch+Bosch experimented with landscape art (as did the members of Pecs Workshop), and the only artwork that these collectives created together was a landscape art action in the bed of the Palic Lake in 1975.
