7. October – 4 November 2019
Tibor Szalai: Brettschneider Architectures
curator: Anna Julianna Szabó, advisor: János Szoboszlai
open until: 2019 11 04
Tibor Szalai (1958-1998) received international acclaim from the mid-1980s for his large-scale paper installations with architectonic details. Between 1985 and 1998, he participated in a number of prestigious exhibitions abroad (Vienna, Amsterdam, Venice, Stockholm, Graz, Ulm, Bremen, Sydney, Warsaw, Zagreb) with his paper installations, which he assembled on-site. In 1988, he was invited to participate in the Aperto exhibition at the 43rd Venice Biennale, organized by the Biennale’s international curators. Around this time, he also participated in several joint exhibitions in Hungary and abroad with deconstructivists Gábor Bachman, László Rajk and Attila Kovács.
The BSCH Architecture paper installations became Szalai‘s most original works. Contemporaries and posterity admired their inventive, monumental and yet fragile structure, as well as the improvisational on-site execution. The tragic fate of his paper installations is that they all but perished. As we cannot show the original works, the exhibition features the documentations of the original exhibitions and enlarged prints of the exhibition photos. Only a few fragments of Szalai’s works survived, and only one object remained intact, which was not made of paper, but of plastic, commissioned by the Hungarian National Gallery (BSCH Architecture, 1995).
“Anyone who has ever seen one of these magical white paper constructions is overcome by admiration, and will soon notice the fragile balance between chaos and order.” (Katalin Néray)