Inventarium by András Gál

Inventarium  by András Gál (HU)

curator: Bea Puskás & Tomas Opitz

opening on April 9, 2025, 7:00 pm

opening remarks by Zsolt Petrányi

April 10 – May 10, 2025
TOBE Gallery | Budapest, Hungary

András Gál’s radical painting practice, which has always been quite unconventional within the Hungarian art scene, has now entered a stage of self-reflection. For the past thirty years, the artist has faithfully and firmly adhered to a program rooted in 20th-century abstraction, analytic painting, and the shaped canvas. At its core, however, it is closest to the Materialbild tendency, focusing on the maximal expression of the materiality of paint. At the same time, his method—stripped down to the essence of painting—emphasizes gesture, process, and the conditions of the studio, culminating in allover structures created using paint rollers and spatulas.

The exhibition Inventarium is András Gál’s self-reflective attempt to take stock of and systematize the body of work he has produced within this conceptual framework. Each piece represents a distinct station along the journey between 1994 and 2024, ranging from oil paintings to drawings and watercolors, all the way to acrylic panel works. However, this is not a classically linear oeuvre with a single narrative; rather, the recurring types of works attest to the ongoing and cyclical nature of his painterly commitment. The alternation of forms and surfaces ensures permeability between different time frames. The “chopped” paintings, the grey monochromes, the drawings and reference forms extracted from sketchbooks, and the photographs all radiate toward a central worktable in the space, collectively attempting to construct a unique inventarium—that is, an inventory or catalog of objects.

This table is, in the most literal sense, an everyday object—a studio tool whose profane presence disrupts the sterile perception of the gallery space. It not only connects the place of creation and presentation of the artworks, but also establishes a direct relationship that links the artist’s hand to the viewer’s gaze. This kind of unbroken, interpersonal connection is characteristic of radical painting itself. To quote painter and theorist Joseph Marioni: “The viewer is actively involved in the experience of the circumstances of the work. The painting comes alive in the experience of its presentation.” In the vast sea of technologically mediated images, the painterly act—rooted in classical painting and the tangible presence of gesture—has a unique subversive power to grab, pull in, and gently loosen the everyday dullness of perception.

Observing the exhibited works, we must also contend with a different kind of dullness: greyness. Color appears as a character purely for its own sake—at times spreading across the surface of the image, at other times tipping over the canvas edge—evoking associations ranging from the density of mortar to the worn and grimy walls of old buildings, encompassing everything that might be linked to the atmosphere of totalizing and homogenizing attempts.

What do the past thirty years mean? András Gál’s exhibition draws two conclusions through the lens of time: on one hand, each station attempts to anchor art spatially, but just as the 2024 layer of Grey in situ on a wooden panel conceals a surface from twenty-five years earlier, everything flows back continuously into the original artistic undertaking. The inventory is thus in constant reorganization, yet its coherence and persistently disconcerting radicality—carried by elemental structure-making—remain unshaken.

Luca Fábián, art writer