Igor Hosnedl at Horizont Gallery

Artist: Igor Hosnedl

Exhibition title: The Lecture of Wise Snake

Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

Date: May 2 – June 13, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Horizont Gallery

Horizont Gallery presents Igor Hosnedl’s (1988) debut solo exhibition „The Lecture of Wise Snake” in Budapest. Hosnedl, who is currently based in Berlin, graduated in 2013 from AVU Prague in the studio of Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda. He is one of the key figures of the freshest and youngest Czech painter generation. He is exhibiting his newest paintings cycle in Horizont Gallery. The art of Hosnedl departs from the medium of drawing. Compositions, which first appear in small-scale drawings in his practice are transformed into monumental scale on the paintings, which have sharp outlines and intense dark color tones. This feature also highlights the strong graphic base of Hosnedl’s painting toolkit.
One of the main protagonists of Hosnedl’s cycle is the figure of the snake, which appears also in the title of the exhibition. This central character of the heavily reduced compositions goes through many transformations and circles all the other figures of the images. On the dream-like paintings of Hosnedl we don’t only encounter snakes, but other figures as well: human and architectural trunks, stairs, columns, which are all constructed as visual symbols. The symbols which appear from the subconscious of the artist are subjects of the associations of the viewers. The iconography and the compositional forms of the artist both signal that Hosnedl reinterpreted and hybridised the tradition of surrealist and metaphysical painting.
Hosnedl’s painting practice is based on strong reduction. His destillated and crystallised web of motifs is created along a process of heavy stylization based on drawing. Beside the totemistic figures the space itself has the other central role in the linear image systems of the artist. Hosnedl summons the compositional forms of metaphysical painting, when he creates space through symbolic surfaces in his own works. The space appears as a theatrical scene creating a background and a foreground for the figures, which clearly creates a magical, fable-like character for the works. This aspect of Hosnedl’s art already manifested itself in Horizont Gallery in his earlier joint exhibition with Klára Hosnedlová, curated by Mónika Zsikla entitled „Red Riding Hood”, where the well known fairy tale character was put into the context of modernist architecture. In contrast the autonomous visual universe of Hosnedl is based much more on the unlocalisable melancholy, which appears in the empty, partial and illusionistic space of his paintings.
Although the painting of Hosnedl is based on multiple layers of abstract processes, it is still strongly figurative. Hosnedl gains inspiration for redefining figurativity in painting from the visual grammar of graphic design, including computer games. The paintings of the artist create an illusion of timelessnes, which hosts the surrealistic symbol-centrism and the metaphysical space-construction of the artist in a silent eternity.

-Áron Fenyvesi