Bálint Szombathy
Signs of the city. Wire Forms
Bálint Szombathy has always been seeking to acknowledge insufficiently known or new linguistic forms of visual art. Critical artistic research of the operation and effect of signs in everyday life represents a special chapter in the artist’s work. Exemplary is his remarkable observation of the changing environment – he himself says that he “sees art everywhere”. The medium of photography enabled him to transform the found motifs, to tear them out of their original environment as “linguistic-aesthetic phenomena”. His series of photographs, entitled Signs of the City, draws from the aforementioned contexts of his work. The series was namely created as a result of contemplations of the artist’s environment in Budapest – the depicted motifs are trivial and he particularly documents “civilisational” interventions into the old city, such as the omnipresence of black cables extending over the facades of historic houses, or wires protruding from openings in the buildings, among other things. In a documentary way, the artist has been discovering inconsistencies in the urban structure and capturing various locations and their “signs”, thereby creating hundreds of images in the segment of the “topography of everyday life”. In this sense, Bálint Szombathy is not merely an important representative of neo-avant-garde and engaged art, but also a theoretician and protagonist of “semiotic art”, which also includes the works from the Signs of the City- Wire Forms project.
Signs of the city. Wire Forms, 1971 – 73
30 x 40 cm, unique vintage prints, framed
Price: 700 €
