Ádám Albert at Kisterem / Budapest

disconnected / Kisterem


Ádám Albert 


June 23rd – July 31st, 2020




Képíró u. 5,1053
Budapest, Hungary





At his third solo show in Kisterem, Ádám Albert
presents works which are novel in the artist’s practice in terms of their
central motifs as well as their use of materials. Although he has created works
before related to the depiction of the human body as a pillar of artistic
training, his larger projects were usually based on topics dealing with
economic, political ideas and on themes of modernity. In comparison, Albert’s
newest works – hand blown glass objects and their carriers – create a world of
fictitious anatomy. The creation of the group of objects which evokes an ethos
of intimacy and corporeality began last December, in light of which the way
certain elements of the exhibition can be associated to pathogens that have
defined the recent months is especially eerie.
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The
nightstand beside hospital beds is beyond doubt a special piece of furniture.
This stand, or rather table, together with what is stored on it represents the
changed necessities of the patient’s life: things that do not have room on the
table do not exist. However, this “table” hardly gets associated with such
basic hospital experiences like the coldness of tiles, the flatness of the
colors white and green, or the voice of the infusion pole rolling out to the
corridor. The nightstands that fill hospital rooms are the manifestations of
the effort of the patients, their relatives, and the nurses as they try to
reconstruct pieces of the real, outside world in the reduced living space of
the hospital: food, books, pocket radios or toilet paper are put beside the
patients’ heads. This is how the nightstand becomes a micro universe, a
personal object in hospital environment.
This clean, objectified intimacy manifests itself in
Ádám Albert’s most recent works in which he visualizes sensations and motives
connected to sickness and recovery and puts them in peculiar contexts. Both the
material and the design of the group of objects discuss the vulnerability of
the human body through the invisibility of sickness: this is how glass becomes
a key motive in the exhibition, either in colored or in its original state. Albert
already experienced with traditional craftsman techniques in a number of his previous
works, and this time he chose glass-blowing that unintentionally associates the
fragility of glass to the fragile nature of human body. Similarly, the objects
made of metal, tiles and glass remind us of the nightstand or the infusion
poles. The glass objects in the shape of neurons or different abstracted,
fictionalized organs also reminds us how uncertain our knowledge about our
bodies’ operations are, how we try to make it intelligible with the help of
metaphors.
The pain of the individual is the pain of the mourner
as well: the sense of absence and emptiness creates a clean, lean interior, and
at the same time it is Albert’s most personal exhibition to this day. This can
be connected to the artist’s loss of his father that materializes in other
objects with almost symbolic significance. The wooden trough, strongly
connected to the pictures of birth and growing up, is exhibited in putrefied
form, held together by a piece of iron, including one of the colored glass
objects. The two metal-glass constructions found in the second room, resembling
a kind of a discussion, surround a putrefied tree branch that comes from the
garden of Albert’s family in Veszprém. Meanwhile, the varied neuron glass
shapes put on black tiles, practically creating a network, – although created
well before the pandemic – still expand the context of the exhibition to the
changed daily life of the last few months. The fear of the unknown, the
irrationality of the virus, the danger of infection get reevaluated this way in
a highly personal but wider social context in which the main question is the
way how pain can be materialized.
by Flóra Gadó