Gross Arnold, the Kossuth Prize-winning graphic artist and painter honored with the Artist of the Nation award, opened the ARNOLDO gallery-café together with his son in 2014 at Bartók Béla út 46. In keeping with its founder’s intention, the cozy little venue — four years old this year — has been nurturing and caring for Gross Arnold’s intellectual and artistic legacy ever since it opened. This year the Municipality of the 11th District is supporting, with an “Újbuda-Mecénás” grant, a year-long research project aimed at studying and presenting the complete oeuvre. The interim results of the research are being presented in three chamber exhibitions.
The first exhibition, connected to the Day of Hungarian Painting program, focuses on Gross’s lesser-known early paintings, primarily portraits.
Gross Arnold’s earliest portraits are self-portraits, the first formulations of his own artistic role. These were followed in the 1950s and 60s by a series of oil portraits, mostly of women. Gross’s portraits exemplify a rendering of the female face poised between the ideal and the real, the abstract and the concrete. Their starting point is in most cases an actual person, but Gross simplifies what he sees down to the essential forms until the same ideal woman, the same “dream-faced” fairy girl, gazes back from every portrait — a permanent inhabitant of his magic garden as well. – Révész Emese
The exhibition was opened by art historian Révész Emese on October 19, 2018, at 7 p.m. An excerpt from the thoughts shared at the opening:
DREAM-FACED – Paintings by Gross Arnold
Although the public knows Gross Arnold’s name primarily as an etcher, painting was by no means foreign to him. His father was a painter who initiated his son into the fundamentals of the craft already in childhood. The figure of the artist standing before the canvas remained a recurring element in Gross’s compositions later on as well. The early paintings shown in our exhibition, made in the 1950s and 60s, are works painted thickly and in strong colors, showing as yet no trace of Gross’s later meticulous line drawing. They rather evoke the expressiveness of Gross’s late ink paintings.
The early works on display are portraits of women and a studio interior. The studio is a recurring element of Gross’s world — one might say one of his principal themes — since in his fantasy world even the fairy-tale gardens are extended studios, magical places evoking the idyllic childhood years in Turda (Torda). In the light-filled, sunlit studio that appears in the paintings, houseplants are likewise important, but a birdcage and the characteristic clown figure also appear in the space, both of which return in his later interior scenes. On the studio wall hang portraits of women, compositions similar to the works known today.
The style of the portraits is broad and classicizing, recalling Picasso’s female heads of classical beauty. Though here and there the hair and dress fashions of the day can be discerned in them, these icon-like frontal busts are for the most part not likenesses of actual persons but ideal images — approximations of that imaginary, delicate female figure who, as the ideal woman and model, is a recurring inhabitant of the artist’s fantasy garden in Gross’s later works.
– Révész Emese
The exhibition is open from October 20 to November 9, 2018, during the gallery’s opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. – 9 p.m. 1111 Budapest, Bartók Béla út 46.
