Tamás Ábel / I will not be who I was

In 2015, artist Tamás Ábel graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a degree in glass art. This anniversary also marks a turning point in his artistic career, opening up new avenues for the future. In our exhibition, we would like to present these changes in his art, referring back to the events of the past 10 years with each piece.

The title of the exhibition also refers to these processes. We are living in a time of accelerated environmental and technological change, but our own continuous physical changes are struggling to keep pace with the speed and scale of these changes. Despite the increasing number of social media platforms and chat applications, we are becoming increasingly lonely and increasingly depressed if we dive into the endless digital glitter and "burn out" our retinas at night. Our addictive tendencies inevitably draw us into anything that distracts us even slightly from reality, from our everyday tasks and from thinking about our problems. These everyday dependencies give us happiness or a temporary respite from negative burdens, and help us get through even the most difficult times.

The exhibition tells the story of its own transformation through glass sculptures, pictures, and a large-scale site-specific installation made of glass shards. It shows how slowly and with how much difficulty he managed to recognize and transform his own various addictions, intolerances, traumas, or their consequences, whether it be food, drink, gambling, possessiveness, disorder, or loneliness. It also shows the way to escape, to break away, to find true companionship, and to the opportunities that helped him. All this is expressed in narrative form through a mixture of glass, geometry, and realism.

In response to the theme outlined above, new works of art are being created that address the causes of these processes—bad habits, illness, trauma— and their solutions— good habits, healing, transformation – with the help of visual artistic expression. In keeping with the theme, the exhibition features not only glass sculptures but also video works, sculptural installations, site-specific glass installations, and two-dimensional wall-mounted artworks.

Ábel Tamás continues along the path of atypical glass artistry that he has been pursuing for some time, building on the progressive technical solutions of his earlier works, and this approach helps in changing scales and crossing between media, e.g. 2D and 3D works, or recorded performance video formats.

Due to the topicality of the subject, which spans generations, we would like to hold as many guided tours as possible.

Curator: Szonja Dohnál

The exhibition is supported by the National Cultural Fund.
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