The Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, a public institution of county interest operating under the authority of the Cluj County Council, invites you to visit the memorial exhibition of artist Arnold Gross, “Journeys to Real and Imaginary Landscapes,” between July 2–20, 2025. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, at 6 p.m. This exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Arnoldo Gallery and Café, the Liszt Institute of Sfântu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyörgy) and the Consulate General of Hungary in Cluj-Napoca.
On the occasion of the 95th anniversary of the birth of Gross Arnold (1929–2015), we present themes of the artist that span his entire oeuvre: from the visual evocation of the family home and garden, of Turda (Torda) and its surroundings, we move in ever-widening circles toward the landscapes of his homeland, foreign cities, and then imaginary realms.
His native land — the family home standing in the cement-dusted small Transylvanian town of Turda, with his father’s studio inside and his mother’s flower garden, the surrounding hilly countryside, the Turda Gorge, the Arieș (Aranyos) Valley, the Criș (Körös) region, Rimetea (Torockó), the memory of the roads to Sighișoara (Segesvár) — all of these accompanied Gross throughout his life. The timber frame of the swing his father set up in the yard became a recurring, emblematic motif of several of his later works. “For me, Torda meant safety, the shelter that my parents provided until I was seventeen,” he later said.
Most of his works were created using the time-honored technique of etching, which demands great craftsmanship. His compositions are characterized by a goldsmith-like refinement of execution, with which he spreads the strange creatures of his fantasy world across the picture surface like a lace pattern. With his fairy-tale-like, avowedly naive surrealism he created an alternative fantasy world, opening ever newer gates behind the surface of experienced reality. His childlike, idyllic dream world was at times spiced with humor, playfulness and a touch of serene irony.
His central theme is art and the artist’s existence itself. For Gross, this role offered the opportunity to step out of everyday reality. His fantasy world weaves through the natural landscape just as it does through images of great cities. All of it springs from an inner longing to be elsewhere, and from the belief that the grayness of everyday life can always be overwritten by the cheerfulness of play and the exaltation of celebration.
In his early self-portraits Gross depicted himself drawing; later he appeared rather in self-ironic, shape-shifting roles, as a bird in a tailcoat or a goat pining after beautiful flower maidens. Indirectly, however, he himself is the protagonist of every one of his pictures: every painter and creative artist in them is Gross’s alter ego.
In Gross’s memory, the studio and garden of the family home in Turda take shape as a paradisiacal Garden of Eden, the undisturbed setting of the artistic work that meant life itself to him (Studio in Turda, Garden of Memories). In this singular space, the creatures of mythic imagination and the machines of the modern technical world coexist peacefully, all brought to a common denominator by the creative artistic imagination (Conversations on Friendship).
Alongside the landscape and the wonder-world of nature, Gross was fascinated from the very beginning by urban space as well. The theme of his early works is the small-town idyll (Garden City Dream, Small Town Dream), with its many strange but lovable inhabitants. It was through his travels that he stepped out of this protected milieu evoking his childhood years in Turda. First he made Budapest his home and rewrote it with his imagination (Budapest, City of Blue Dreams). And from the mid-1960s he gladly accompanied his exhibitions abroad in person.
The exhibition was selected from the archive of the ten-year-old Gross Arnold Gallery by Gross András, the gallery’s director and custodian of the estate. The exhibition texts were edited by Gross András, drawing on Emese Révész’s study.
