Artist: Adrian Kupcsik
Exhibition title: Der Zauberlehrling
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: January 8 – February 12, 2020
Photography: Dávid Biró, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Horizont Gallery, Budapest
In Goethe’s poem, the sorcerer’s apprentice loses control of objects, forgets the proper magic spell, and eventually desperately calls upon the master.
The images are made from studio leftovers, mainly from the relic of (non-painting) pieces of art. The process of creation produces unpredictable results, so the knowledge of the “master” is necessary to create order.
In my case, this “masterful intervention” means fine tuning the composition, tuning the lights and shadows. The right magic word to create order is the title itself.
Painting is a projection of this parallel world. The paintings are visual narratives that are familiar, but more like an inverted “Déjà vu” experience. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s very familiar. Where we see what is happening in the picture but we cannot understand it precisely because we cannot convert its language. The goal is to create a visual / parallel universe within, where many different things can happen, but the logic and elements of the language are identical.
The elements of the language, the “magic spells”, are the waste / residual materials that formed part of the volume of the original object, becoming symbols of unnecessity.
The rules of the language, also the way in which “magic spells” are applied, is the creation method itself.
Adrián Kupcsik (1969) is a Hungarian artist living and working currently in Düsseldorf, Germany. Kupcsik graduated from the University of Fine Art in Budapest in 2001, where he also earned his DLA in 2009. He developed a pictorial language and multimedial artistic practice, which brought him many acknowledgements: Kupcsik won the STRABAG International Art Award (2002), the Ludwig Foundation Prize (1999) and the Deutsche Telekom Fine Art Award (2000).
