The painter’s job. Ákos Birkás (2006 – 2014)
2014. Oct. 12. - 2015. Feb. 08.
The exhibition was the first debut in Debrecen of the internationally acclaimed Ákos Birkás, born in 1941, and consisted of works from the eight years since his retrospective exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Some of the ninety or so paintings were being shown in Hungary for the first time. And for reasons of friendship and intellectual affinity, guest artists also appeared in MODEM’s largest exhibition space: the Dutch Jan van der Pol, the Austrian Johanna Kandl and Attila Szűcs each commented on a work by Birkás.
The title of the exhibition refers to the traditionally highly mystified studio work, i.e. the “guild” tradition of the craft, and also questions the general perception of the role of the painter. What should the painter commit himself to? Does he still have a job to do, or does he only have jobs? The rich artistic career of Ákos Birkás, full of decisive turns, ranging from early photorealist paintings to the use of fine art photography, from abstract painting to figurative and narrative images, provides a variety of answers to these questions, since this oeuvre, despite all its powerful shifts, is above all a consistent analysis of the medium; an example of the research of painting, of the (self-)analysis of the artist and of the work.
Curator: Kukla Krisztián
Artists: Birkás Ákos, Jan van der Pol, Johanna Kandl, Szűcs Attila