This year Artissima, Kisterem gallery presents works by Tamás Kaszás. Kaszás’s art centres on ecological, economic and social issues. His artistic approach dominated by concepts such as individual and communal autonomy, collaborative solutions, re-coordination of experience and knowledge, marginal viewpoints and sustainability.
With the displayed artworks Kaszás leads us into an imagined future which humanity might face after an economic, ecological and technological collapse. These works can be considered as artistic speculations in a science fiction scenario. Space Colonization is an almost 2,5 meter high steel sculpture, wherein he appropriated the diagram like depictions of 18th-century slave ships’ graphics. By this allusion, Kaszás draws parallels between colonization in the past and an imagined one that could happen from outer space in an alternative future.
Besides his central artistic approach, it is hard to describe Kaszás’ art with one singular and personal style. He applies different visual languages and cultural references for instance in his graphic works, like Wear for Human Billboard, or in his paintings such as Every Practice… His purpose is to suggest a group of people or a community as authors when they creating graphics together to inform each other on survival practices in a technologically broken word. In a other case as the chalk drawings of Memorial Course, Kaszás turns back to the past to invoke the recollection of the political narratives of agitation posters, not from an ideological but from an aesthetical view. Kaszás uses figural elements from 20th-century posters of historical political movements but without their original texts, political signs, and logos. It gives the impression like someone in the present had reconstructed these old posters by faded memories alone. Only the visual parts are clear, but not the message they originally had.
Tamás Kaszás (1976) lives and works in Horány, near Budapest. He is one of the most internationally recognised Hungarian artist of his generation. In the last few years, he had solo shows in institutions such as De Appel, Amsterdam; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon or Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Łodz. This November he will be featured in the group exhibition ’How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. Kaszás works can be found in public collections such as Tate Modern, London; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Łodz and Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Kaszás also works under the name of ‘Ex- artists’ Collective in collaboration with Anikó Loránt and also with Krisztián Kristóf as Randomroutines.