THE LEVERKÜHN EQUATION, 2018

THE LÉVERKÜHN EQUATION

Why does everything appear to me as though it were a parody of itself? Why must I feel as if almost all... no, without exception, all the means and established possibilities of art today are only suitable for creating parody?"
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus
This exhibition has been ready in my visual memory for many years. I consider its predecessor to be the – echofree – exhibition titled Visionary Realism that I curated here in 2007, featuring works by artists who are no longer alive. Since then, it has existed in the form of a thought; and the question is – further quoting Mann, this time from The Genesis of Doctor Faustus – "whether the time has now come for this task that has been aimed at for so long, albeit very vaguely."
The task: to take representatives of the grotesque, bizarre movement that transcends the scruples of form-making from the tragically tinged Visionary Realism and supplement the exhibition with contemporaries working in a similar spirit, so that Gyula Sugár's axiom applies equally to both "historical" and current works: "Information content instead of aesthetics." In this way, a personal-visionary interpretation of reality that disregards professional conditioning and contemporary art concepts could meet today's reflexive-ironic practices that critically address the system of art production, the theoretical fuss surrounding it, and the chosen medium alike. From genre parodies, "over-painted" pictures, banal themes, and hybrid forms, a constellation that also preserves personal traits can emerge, containing episodes from the unwritten history of Hungarian bad painting.
Then artists and works began to line up alongside the mentioned thought... but I'm not saying it right, it wasn't like that, but the reverse, as always when I organized a "curatorial exhibition." In the background of the daily quota, slowly and long-gathering visual experiences connect to each other until finally, in the best case – but consistently on a sensual-experiential basis – some phenomenon that can subsequently be put into words emerges from them.
I believe this is when the time comes for the "long-targeted" task and the test of visual memory: the real meeting of works previously "thought together" in Óbuda.
Gábor Andrási