Attila Csörgő. Archimedean Point

Three institutions – Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam Luxembourg and Hamburger Kunsthalle – Galerie der Gegenwart – were partners in realizing the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of the outstanding artist Attila Csörgő. The exhibition was providing a comprehensive overview of his unbroken and consistent career, starting from the early 1990s and reaching international acclaim in the form of major art awards and exhibition participations.

On the occasion of the exhibition, in September 2010, the book Attila Csörgő: Archimedean Point was published. Archimedean Point is the first publication to offer a comprehensive overview of the past 20 years of Attila Csörgő’s work, which includes essays by Simone Menegoi, Miklós Peternák, Dieter Roelstraete; Michael Harrison’s interview with Attila Csörgő; as well as texts on works by Attila Csörgő.

The work of Attila Csörgő leads us into a universe of scientific exploration that is passionate while also expressing the joy, humor, and detachment proper to artistic creation. He often immerses himself for months into intricate problems of mathematics, physics or projective geometry, creating works that demonstrate possible solutions to these problems. At other times, he constructs special cameras to capture reality on pictures never seen before. He is engaged in optical illusions generated by the interaction of light and movement – surprising and unexpected physical phenomena that shatter the viewer's belief in apparently obvious physical laws. Through simulacra of objects or forms – the virtual products of his unusual devices – he offers a look into an underlying reality that normally goes unnoticed, hidden to the routine ways of our everyday perception.

Archimedean Point presents Csörgő’s oeuvre as consisting of four primary thematic currents: Transparent Systems, Distorted Spaces, Peeled Spaces, and Images of Time and Sculptures of Time. Using these as points of departure an attempt is made here to examine Csörgő’s world.