MARK FRIDVALSZKI

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2024
 
Uforia, Vintage Galéria, Budapest
Text by Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács; photos by Benedek Regős (interieur), Dávid Biró (repro)
 
The title of Mark Fridvalszki’s first solo exhibition at Vintage Gallery elevates the name of a 1967 festival that took place in the UFO Club, a centre of British counterculture – as a travelling utopia into the Present. The UFO metaphor, becoming central in Fridvalszki’s recent works, was capable of condensing the whole countercultural zeitgeist into itself during these years: the ”seductive strangeness” of radical changes and alternative lifestyles due to the social, art and technology revolutions around 1968, dimensions of consciousness opening through psychedelics or Eastern spiritualism, Pink Floyd’s space-rock launched at the UFO Club or the futurist jazz of Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and Sun Ra, as well as the sci-fi fantasies expanding around the moon landing, from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Just like in A Space Odyssey, the UFO dimension in Fridvalszki’s works prise open the collage-compositions constructed from archival image material in the form of space-black abstractions, as a cosmic horizon or line of flight expanding its temporal and spatial framework, or as a fourth dimension bending space-time, which is the source of the spirit of the avantgarde from the beginning, due to Duchamp and Picasso. The collage principle defining these works, the arrangement of textual and visual elements drawn from diverse sources into an integrated presence and sense itself embodies the perspective of a fourth dimension, just as the alien played by David Bowie in the 1976 Man Who Fell to Earth simultaneously watches twelve TVs with various programmes.
Elliptical, circular and spheric motifs, populating the panels of Fridvalszki are likewise UFO metaphors to the extent that the UFO itself is a metaphor, on the one hand for a cultural ideal, of popular modernism that strives to redistribute and turn the avantgarde-modernist experimental sphere into a democratic public culture, and on the other hand, a political ideal, planetarism, continuing to envision a leftist-progressive alternative against capitalist globalism. The textual and visual references in Fridvalszki’s works on view here relate to both of these closely connected ideals, just as the circular and spheric motifs roll from the miniature Ben Day dots of comics to the planetary images of cosmic dimensions, from the book and album covers embodying “popular abstraction”, through the pair of eyes of David Bowman exposed to psychedelic abstraction, all the way to the pair of globes of the Berlin Fernsehturm. Through all of this, Fridvalszki’s artistic trajectory also comes full circle: while Uforia constitutes the next station of his programme of ”future archaeology”, it is also a return to the various aesthetic and contextual elements of his works preceding his current period from 2018, reaching all the way back to his earliest works made some fifteen years ago, consisting circular compositions, cosmic visions, technological alienation and alien technologies.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Untitled (UFO by G. Adamski, 1951), 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 130x180 cm
 
Reaching the Higher State of Consciousness, 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 130x180 cm
 
Black Hole Sun, 2024, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 100x100 cm
 
Untitled (Estetika, 1968), 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 120x120 cm
 
Untitled (Aquarius, 1975), 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 80x140 cm
 
Untitled (Fernsehturm, 1988), 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 75x120 cm
 
Pink Panther, 1975, 2023, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 80x80 cm
 
Groove On, 2024, pigment transfer, acrylic, canvas, 75x100 cm
 
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© Mark Fridvalszki 2016–2024