LUDWIG NEXT - MONOCHROME CLACK
Press conference
20 December 2013, 11 a.m.
Followed by a guided tour in the exhibition given by the artists
In December 2013,the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art launches a new series of exhibition, titled Ludwig Next that presents fresh ideas and projects by local artists within the frame of four weeks long shows. The new series aims to give a direct insight into current work and activity of contemporary Hungarian art-workshops, also to present new artworks that had not been publicly seen before. Our first guest is going to be:
Monochrome Clack | Intermedial installations of Éva Köves and Andrea Sztojánovits
As early as in the previous century, constructivism was a specific kind of cultural response to the problems of a shattered world and broken societies following World War One, Monochrome Clack establishes a new symbiosis of genres, wishing to reflect on the problems of the present-day mutinous globalized world. The project is a result of the joined creative activities of two Hungarian artists who build a unique connection between the traditional culture of image creation —painting, in the given case—and contemporary electronic art.
Éva Köves, painter, from the mid-generation of Hungarian artists and Andrea Sztojánovits representing the younger generation of artists, began cooperating in 2009. Their intermedial pieces of art are based on the finding that computer animation (movements, light, sound – i.e. music and text) projected on oil/canvas/photo paintings (painting-installations) not only establishes a new type of relation between visual arts and genres of literature but on meeting an active observer’s attitude it creates a new-type of medium from the static elements of the painting and constantly changing elements of digital animation. In this case, the complexity of the artwork will be accepted even by those spectators and listeners, who otherwise would reflect only on some of the constituent elements of it—separately on the painting, or on the VJ-culture, the music, or the poetry. After several exhibitions in Hungary, the intermedial installations of Monochrome Clack met with a warm response at the Donumenta exhibition (Regensburg, 2010), and also at the LivePerformers Meeting (Rome, 2011).
Éva KÖVES | The creative methods of Éva Köves are novel, and exceptional: she mounts her photos on canvas, takes them further in paint, and then goes on to create mostly large painting-installations from them, at times consisting of over a dozen pieces. Éva does not belong to any particular contemporary school or artistic group, but her themes, way of thinking, as well as urban commitment relates her to the geometrical, constructivist, anti-mainstream program in the first half of the twentieth century, especially, of the Bauhaus and László Moholy-Nagy. Since 1989, she has had some 30 individual exhibitions in Hungary and internationally, has taken part in numerous group shows, and has been a frequent participant at representative exhibitions that introduce contemporary Hungarian art and avant-garde endeavours within that.
Andrea SZTOJÁNOVITS | Graduated at the Intermedia and Pedagogy Departments of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 2009. Presently, she attends the Doctoral School of the Academy. For nearly ten years she has been engaged with one of the frontier fields of digital picture creation: improvisational audio-visual performances, prevalently called VJ (video performer) on both theoretical and practical levels. From the point of view of Andrea’s artistic activities, transporting VJ-culture, its visions, as well as way of thinking, into the “traditional” field of fine arts by producing installations and performances, has a decisive importance.
