Ultramarine used to be better, or at least it carried more weight. Its value once measured wealth and devotion at the same time, since the amount of ultramarine used in a home altar painting reflected both financial capacity and spiritual commitment. Altarpieces were not always visible. They remained closed during ordinary days and opened on specific occasions, revealing painted scenes in moments of ritual, celebration, or heightened attention. The act of opening was never neutral. It marked a shift from the everyday into a space of meaning, reflection, and shared focus. Today galleries echo these structures in another form. They function as contemporary temples where artworks operate like mascots or lucky talismans for the soul. They gather attention, hold projection, and invite us into temporary systems of belief. Art may not promise salvation, but it can make life more vivid, more bearable and more connected. It allows for movement, for gathering, and for moments of joy where we can linger, look, and even dance around contemporary altars. UNITY IS MOVEMENT brings together seven international artists including János Brückner, Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Áron Lőrincz, Tincuta Marin, and Kata Tranker around the historical form of the winged altarpiece. Reimagined through contemporary practices, the works draw on the visual language of devotion while opening it toward plural and often ambiguous systems of belief. Taking its title from a work by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, the exhibition asks what we worship today and what produces reverie, attachment, or faith, as well as which forms of belief have the capacity to hold us together. Across painting, sculpture, and mosaic, the altarpiece appears as a structure that both conceals and reveals. Its opening becomes an active gesture that makes visible inner worlds, private mythologies, and speculative belief systems. In uncertain times, these gestures of opening can also suggest forms of unity, where shared attention and collective experience emerge through images, objects, and encounters. Áron Lörincz presents mischievous and carefully rendered pirate figures placed within lush environments that recall Rococo landscapes, where the jungle becomes a reflection of the city and a metaphor for the conditions we inhabit. János Brückner constructs pixel based optical illusions that translate digital fragmentation into a labor intensive visual field built by hand. Kata Tranker creates glazed paper pulp reliefs that revisit the biblical story of creation and the transformation of Eve through material experimentation. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger imagines speculative ecological futures in which bodies, technologies, and environments intertwine. Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht develop sculptural scenes informed by Persian garden imagery and miniature painting, populated by hybrid figures that exist between life, death, and imagined afterlives. Tincuta Marin contributes a quieter but equally present layer, where material and symbolic elements converge into introspective compositions. Together, these works form a constellation of perspectives that do not resolve into a single narrative but remain in motion. Unity here is not fixed but continuously produced through encounter, attention, and the shared experience of looking.
–Text by Péter Bencze
