Gábor Záborszky portrait

ARS POETICA... FOR MY BIRTHDAY

The first thing I noticed was that in recent years every time I was introduced to someone I was the elder; it now seems this is something that will only get worse. Then came Klisé Publisher’s invitation to give an account of my thoughts about the year 2000. It was then that I was finally convinced that our wrapping the world in a net and setting milestones in space and time is not the world’s issue but our own.Which is why, perhaps, it is not the year two thousand that counts, but rather, my lived fifty. Moreover, it is very probable that subjective existence has some determining effect on the world. Our relationship is a give-and-take one, in the process of which we both change.Milestones. About twenty years ago, the eight animal figures of Stories of the World. Made of clay and chaff, coloured with earth-colours. All of them are now in museums. They each afforded a remarkably ancient, atavistic experience in both material and spirit. Before I made them I had seen primeval man’s cave at Lascaux, New Mexico’s Indian villages and the Greek archipelago. What powers the past has; how powerfully definitive they are!

I learned and taught a lot. I am convinced that in the age of the Internet and the electronic superhighway teaching is when one person speaks to another about things he or she knows, perhaps, better. I have always been strict with my students with regard to cognizance, but gave them huge freedom when it came to representation. I read Miklós Borsos’s book in my youth. I glanced back from halfway. It was beautiful. It radiated a San Francis-type of pantheistic feeling. Although Lake Balaton is not exactly the Aegean Sea, I understood that art and life are the same. Ever since I have disbelieved in speculation, and I expect respect to and curiosity about the ways of the world.In the late Eighties I had several joint exhibitions with Yiro Okura. I had the opportunity to meet a non-European artistic attitude that I nevertheless felt familiar and close, and which, whilst visiting the monasteries in Kyoto, gradually became fathomable and ultimately the solely acceptable. Why was it that John Cage said that one of the rocks in the rock garden of the Ryoan-yi temple, untouched for a thousand years, was in the wrong place?; and why was my friend Okura unusually taken aback by this?In the past decades the current events of art have been of less concern to me. Rather, I have been preoccupied with my own and matter’s ’soul’.

Paper, and increasingly better paper. First, I made works which featured not objects but their imprints.A unique – now you see it now you don’t – situation emerged. A white shine on the verge of existence and non-existence. It was this ‘lacuna’ I coupled with the colour of gold. I have never used gold as the barbaric symbol of wealth. I was concerned with the mediaeval notion of transcendental space. What reality! The eye cannot determine the exact location of gold, and this truly leads to an indeterminable non-earthly space.

In retrospect, life produces bizarre order. Initially my works were exhibited in barrel-vaulted cellars (Pécs, Óbuda, Stockholm). Then, moving upwards, baroque monasteries followed (Rome, Lienz, Frankfurt). Then finally, in 1998, the movingly powerful church space of Kiscelli. A great challenge indeed. To increase dimensions, I reinforced the paper pulp with glass fibre. This opened new horizons altogether. The material, once only functional in 2D, became plastic, yet preserved its unbelievable delicacy. It was this direct, mundane sensuality that clashed with the intangible incorporeality of gold, sometimes silver. I exhibited gates that opened into eternity, gaps and scrolls bearing burdensome secrets. It was in such perfect unison with that space that for a long time I thought nothing more could be said.Mozart’s Magic Flute is now playing in my studio, and spring is in the air.

Gábor Záborszky
Budapest, February 2000

Biography

1950 17th April, Budapest
1974 Diploma in painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. Postgraduate studies in graphic and mural techniques
1977–1980 Derkovits Scholarship
1980- Teacher at the Arts and Crafts Secondary School
1982 Award at the 6th Norwegian International Biennial of Graphic Art for the innovative use of an old technique.
1983 Participation in the “Graphic work from sheet metal”congress at Grado
1987 Founds Z/ART Foundation, together with Katalin Bodó
1988 Guest at the Kunstgewerbe Schuke Basel and the Akademie Graz
1989-1995 Senior lecturer at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts
1992 Participation in IAPMA congress in Budapest
1993 Working in Bonn on a municipal scholarship
1995 Receives Munkácsy Award Participates in the International Paper Symposium at Kyoto
1996 Scholarship awarded by the city of Münich Z/ART Foundation is founding member of the Budapest Museum of Modern Art
1999 Guest at the University of Art, Philadelphia
2001 Book published on work’s of 25 years
2002 Retrospective exhibition organised by the Municipal Art Museum in Győr on works’ of 25 years
2004 Works in the building of MEO Contemporary Art Collection. Completes largest paper casts ever made by him. “The Water-colourist’ Dream” exhibition in the Art Hall Budapest
2005 Exhibition in the Zárt Gallery Budapest
2006 Receives Érdemes Művész Award
2007 Member of the Széchenyi Academy Letters and Art
2015 He ends the teaching and he organizes an exposition with the works his masters's and his students's in Gallery Mazart
2016 Fugues. Guida-Riposta-Repercussio. Retrospective exhibition, Ludwig museum-Museun of Contemporary Art