MARK FRIDVALSZKI

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>2017
 
Vertical Panorama (A), 2017, mixed media installation; thanks to Attila Ősi (Hungarian Dinosaur Expedition); group show, Leopold Bloom Art Award, New Budapest Gallery
 
American land art artist Robert Smithson compared the Earth’s strata to an unorganized museum, pointing at the ideological content of geological endeavors. Mark Fridvalszki’s Vertical Panorama (A) follows this very thought. His multipart installation zooms in on the township of Iharkút (Hungary), evoking and drawing parallels between the region’s significant bauxite-mining (1979-2005) and paleontologist expedition. Bauxite is the main source for aluminium, a symbol of mankind’s boundless ambitions; its usage ranges from space exploration, military innovation, and computer technology to home appliances. The Iharkút landscape, turned unpopulated and Mars-like by surface mining, a map transformed by man, becomes the scene of both progress and annihilation.
However, in the wall of the pit left behind by the mine, experts of the Department of Palaeontology at ELTE discovered a stratum dating to the Cretaceous. Since 2010, researches have been systematically excavating the remains of the 85-million-years old flora and fauna conserved in the rock, uncovering a ’lost world’. Through the artistic display of the location’s layers, Fridvalszki illustrates the paradox condition also known as ’Jurassic Park syndrome’ (Svetlana Boym), in which the utopian ambitions represented by the bauxite merge into one another with our curiosity toward ancient periods. Incorporating nostalgic and eerie elements, the installation, a speculative, three-dimensional collage, combines pseudo-scientific abstraction and documentary visual appropriation. – Krisztina Hunya
 
Ammonite, 2017, aluminium cast, ⌀7,5x5 cm; group show, Leopold Bloom Art Award, New Budapest Gallery
 
Starless II, 2017, digital print, foil, plotter, 230x350 cm; Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig; photo by Lena Flohrschütz
 
Steingrau (RAL 7030), 2017, wall paint, cement, 395x695x400 cm; On Erosion, solo show, Soda Gallery, Bratislava; photo by Adam Šakovy
 
The Dragon, 2017, plastic models, enamel paint, rubber ring, granite, glass, 28x28x20 cm; 9,81, solo show, Art+Text, Budapest; photo by Dávid Biró
 
Bestimmtes Moment I, II, III, 2016, acrylic transfer, sand on canvas, each 50x60 cm; 9,81, solo show, Art+Text, Budapest; photo by Dávid Biró
 
Take Me Back, 2017, digital print, plotter, 400x550 cm, light foil; sound by Jánon Iván Kárpáti, 11’46’’; solo show, Artkartell Projectspace, Budapest; photo by János Iván Kárpáti
 
Starless 1-12, 2016, acrylic transfer on canvas, each 60x60 cm; xerox on paper, size variable; Interference, group show, Trafó Gallery, Budapest; photo by Miklós Surányi
 
Mark Fridvalszki is obsessively examining (post-)digital aesthetics and glitch. His complex installation in the gallery space can be interpreted as a personal techno-archeological research. His works can be seen also as imprints of a nostalgia that reaches towards a more understandable, more analogue world, which is not as indigestible as the mechanisms of the digital black box. Fridvalszki’s​ Starless​ series, which consists of compositions on canvas and ​wallpaper, clearly tends back towards materiality after the digital revolution of the ’00 years. Fridvalszki operates with geometrical motifs that rehabilitate the tactics of op-art and minimalist tendencies. With the technology of acrylic transfer on his paintings he creates analogue glitches, which make the calculability of the digitally generated motifs collapse. The phenomenon of the glitch that appears in the works of Mark Fridvalszki is always located inside the machine. The glitch is always caused by the human operator, who creates errors in the hardware or applies a wrong software code. But because of the glitch we are able to see behind the machine, the error unveils itself and actually this is an effect which helps to understand how the machine is operating—paraphrasing the thoughts of Carolyn Kane. – Áron Fenyvesi
 
In Archaic Mode, 2016, digital print on paper, 380x1180 cm; UV ink print on sandwich panel, each 100x100 cm; sound source: Klaus Schulze, Timewind, 1975, Brain Records; The Portent of Light, group show, MeetFactory, Prague; photo by Tomáš Souček
 
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© Mark Fridvalszki 2016–2024