Tamás Jovanovics & Esther Stocker: Entering the Mess. Perplexing Geometries

The Várfok Gallery’s Autumn Season opens with a joint exhibition of Tamás Jovanovics and Esther Stocker. The works to be shown will introduce an elementary and, yet, complex system of geometric structures and grids composed of a reduced set of forms – a kind of ‘exuberant minimalism’.

Jovanovics and Stocker met for the first time in Vienna. Both artists regularly exhibit worldwide, and their art and philosophies are quite close to each other but, still, they are markedly distinct. The structure of Tamás Jovanovics’s works is usually interrupted by skillfully applied, feint, “system errors” and an intelligent use of colour, whereas the strictly black and white paintings of Esther Stocker have a more compound structure and include a significant departure from the order of this structure. Both artists celebrate and, at the same time, question the strictness and systematic dogmatism of minimalism with their works. The exhibition is complemented by a detailed catalogue further discussing the dialogue between Jovanovics’s and Stocker’s art and philosophies.

Tamás Jovanovics was born in Budapest in 1974. He studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, at the Université de Provence in Aix-en-Provence and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 2009, he was selected by MontrasioArte to be an Artist in Residence for three months in New York (USA) at the Harlem Studio Fellowship. In the same year, his work received special mention by the curators of the Milan based Premio Artivisive San Fedele. Jovanovics exhibits in London, Milan and Vienna on a regular basis and has held exhibitions in numerous galleries and museums, both public and private, in Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, New York and Rome. He is a member of the OSAS (Open Structure Art Society) in Budapest since 2015.

Esther Stocker was born in 1974 in Silandro, South-Tirol. She graduated from the Akademie der Bildenden Künster in Vienna in 1994, from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 1996, and in 1999 from the Californian Art Centre College of Design. Her art crosses various genres including traditional and mural painting, installation, public art, photography and video. She has produced several public wall paintings and held successful exhibitions in noteworthy galleries of contemporary art, including the Vienna Kunsthalle, Vienna MUMOK, Brussels CCNOA, Hanover Künstlerhaus, MACRO Roma and other major galleries of contemporary art worldwide. Several railway stations of Taiwan and Japan are decorated with Stocker’s public works and she is currently working on another public art project in Shanghai.

The exhibition is organized by the Várfok Gallery in collaboration with the Österreichisches Kulturforum Budapest.