Karoly Keseru: keseruso (XX Century in Fragments)

The Várfok Gallery’s autumn season will begin with the solo exhibition of Karoly Keseru. This will be the artist’s largest individual introduction since he joined the gallery’s permanent circle of artists in 2014.

Karoly Keseru (1962 Budapest) migrated to Australia in 1987. He led his fine arts studies there, on the Swinburne University and the Victorian College of the Arts. In 2000 he won one of the utmost significant fine art prizes of Australia, the Samstag, which helped him to continue his studies in London on the Saint Martins College of Arts, where he gained his Masters Degree. Due to Keseru’s Gallery in London, Wien and Hungary, he is a regularly exhibited artist of international art fairs and his exhibitions open one by one around the world. His works can be found in numerous collections in Australia, the United States of America and throughout Europe.

The art of Keseru roots in the 20th century abstract geometrical tendencies beyond the folklore and ritual ornamentation of individual cultures can be traced back into ancient times. His repetitive, intense works are based on the simple expression elements, the point and the line. The playful system of threads sometimes form a grid, sometimes swirls as a vortex around the subspherical tranquillity of the acrylic dots. The exhibition organised in the Várfok Gallery will showcase the latest works which rethink the 20th century isms beyond such curiosities from the oeuvre as the “figural” compositions made in Australia in the early 2000’s or Keseru’s pictures created with glass, wire, stamps and other special materials.

„When I look back at 20 century art I often feel that no matter how radical those movements were – their high time usually lasted only for a few years – they moved on too fast and left their central dilemmas partially unresolved, so one can feel free to step back and re-think, re-investigate even upgrade them. This is what I try to achieve in some of my works subtitled ’20th century series’. Although this art historical source for me is unexploitable it is not the only one, not even within the visual arts. Other endlessly rich areas are the fields of science, religion and philosophy.” – Karoly Keseru