“Man, we know, is but a speck of dust in the universe; yet just as the sun shines through a speck of dust and the sunbeam glints upon it, so the whole universe shines through man.” – Gross Arnold
Four years ago, on the Day of Hungarian Culture, Gross Arnold (November 25, 1929 – January 22, 2015) passed away — graphic artist and painter, recipient of the Artist of the Nation award and of the Kossuth and Munkácsy Prizes, renewer of the etching genre, and one of Hungary’s best-known and most popular fine artists. The artist, born in Turda (Torda), would celebrate his 90th birthday on November 25 this year. For this notable occasion the Gross Arnold Gallery, after several years of preparation and research, is publishing a handsome, finely produced monograph, with an essay by art historian Révész Emese. Readers will first be able to hold the self-published volume in their hands on December 6, at the opening of the retrospective exhibition organized jointly for the occasion by the Gross Arnold Gallery and the Jászi Gallery, hosted by the Széphárom Community Space in District V. A separate catalogue is also being produced for the largest Gross exhibition to date.
“In 2019, a large-scale exhibition organized jointly by the Gross Arnold Gallery and the Jászi Gallery presents Gross Arnold’s oeuvre in one place. Over his half-century career, the widely loved and well-known graphic artist became one of Hungary’s finest masters of etching. In his prints, worked with lace-like meticulousness, an enchanting fairy-tale world comes to life, full of smiling flowers with human faces, birds, angels and fairies. In our exhibition his best-known compositions appear grouped according to his most characteristic themes. At the heart of the show opening on December 5 stand Christmas and Play. Gross himself was an eternal child who loved to play not only in his playful drawings but in real life as well. Alongside the works, therefore, we also evoke his characteristic world of objects, with the little railway rattling around the Christmas tree that appears in his pictures as well. Besides play, his other recurring theme is the garden and studio evoking his Transylvanian home. In his pictures the garden itself sometimes becomes a studio, and the studio a dreamlike wonder-world.
Characteristic of Gross’s creative method is the surreal transformation of what he actually saw: visitors will thus encounter his naturalistic landscapes, which he gradually populates with his unique fantasy creatures, slowly turning them into dreamlike fairy gardens. Besides the gardens embodying a longing for elsewhere, another recurring theme of his prints is the city — on one side the quiet idyll of the small town, on the other the fascinating, bustling crowds of the great cities. Gross traveled gladly and often; alongside Budapest, his pictures feature Rome, Florence, Amsterdam and Brussels — all of them, of course, populated by Gross’s peculiar fantasy creatures. The special highlights of the exhibition are the technically remarkable color print variations and the rarely seen oil paintings and dioramas. The latter are spatial extensions of the Gross fantasy world: paintings supplemented with tiny figures and objects, miniature box spaces reminiscent of dollhouses. A few of Gross’s rare and seldom-exhibited oil paintings also appear, among them the large-scale oil painting Conversations on Friendship (Beszélgetések a barátságról) and the two large installations once made for the Buda Penta Hotel, which have never before been shown together in one space.”
– writes the curator of the exhibition
The exhibition presents not only Gross’s works: the entire exhibition space becomes an atmospheric Christmas installation. The symbol of Christmas is in any case close to Gross, as Szentkuthy Miklós writes:
“It is not some cheap topicality that makes us set down the decisive definition of Gross Arnold’s oeuvre when we say: this entire oeuvre is, in truth, one great Christmas-tree opus (great in its thousand micro-miniatures). Hanging, chiming and swinging on the Christmas tree are snowy or ivy-clad houses, cottages, mushrooms, walnuts, cars, bubble moonlights, dolls, bells, charming or strangely grotesque animals: the collection could be called a kind of babette-ballet world-vitrine.”
Courtesy of the MTVA Archive, Sós Mária’s 1978 portrait film about Gross Arnold, Play-Film (Játék-Film), will be screened continuously during the exhibition.
The material of the exhibition was assembled from the collections of the Gross Arnold Gallery and the Jászi Gallery, supplemented with works from private collectors and from the collections of the ibis Mercure Castle Hill, the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and the Museum of Applied Arts.
Curator of the exhibition: Révész Emese, art historian
The exhibition catalogue and the monograph are available for purchase at the venue.
Address: Széphárom Community Space, 1053 Budapest, Szép utca 1/B
Exhibition opening and catalogue launch: December 6, 2019, 6 p.m.
The exhibition will be opened by art historian Révész Emese. Featuring at the opening: the Millefiori trio
The exhibition is open from December 7, 2019 to January 31, 2020, Tuesday to Friday between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., Saturday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (CLOSED from December 24 to January 2)
The research and the preparation of the volume were supported by the “Újbuda-Mecénás” creative grant of the Municipality of Újbuda, District XI of Budapest, and by the “Budapest Bank for Budapest” Foundation. The publication of the volume and the exhibition were supported by the National Cultural Fund.
The exhibition catalogue was supported by the Municipality of Belváros-Lipótváros, District V of Budapest.
Further information:
Gross Arnold Gallery – 1111 Budapest, Bartók Béla út 46. – Gross András – 06 70 3387001 – arnoldogaleria@gmail.com
Jászi Gallery – 1065 Budapest, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út 33. I. em. 4. – Jászi Orsolya – 06 30 6276024 – info@jaszigaleria.hu
