Viennacontemporary 2025

At viennacontemporary 2025, our booth presents four artists: Tamás Melkovics, Tamás Jovanovics, and Tamás Soósand Márton Nemes. Together, they bring very different artistic approaches across sculpture and painting, but all share an interest in structural thinking, metaphysical questions, and perceptual ambiguity.

 

Tamás Melkovics is the youngest of the group, creates modular sculptural systems that combine classical sculptural language with digital technologies and contemporary materials. His Alloy Series explores variation and movement in space, often recalling musical or linguistic structures. Through these works, he reimagines sculpture as a dynamic, reconfigurable system that reflects on both physical form and philosophical ideas.

 

Tamás Melkovics (b. 1987)

 

Since 2019, Melkovics has been working with modular sculptural systems. His focus is on ideas like repetition, interchangeability, and the way objects can exist in networks. Beyond his Symbols' Icons series, his main interest is the possibility of a “networked sculpture” – one that can constantly change and take on infinite variations. He often describes this as similar to an open sentence that never really ends. In this sense, his work connects Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work” with László Barabási-Albert’s network theory, reimagining sculpture as something fluid, dynamic, and interconnected.

 

Tamás Melkovics is a Hungarian sculptor whose practice bridges classical sculptural traditions with contemporary technologies and experimental approaches. Since around 2019, he has been working with modular sculptural systems, exploring repetition, interchangeability, and networked existence. His works often resemble living, dynamic forms—structures that seem ready to move, speak, or grow—connecting deeply to shared subconscious ideas of birth and organic systems.

 

One of his key bodies of work, the Alloy Series, investigates variation and spatial rhythm through structures reminiscent of musical or linguistic composition. He often combines cast iron, limestone, aluminum, and digital parametric design, creating works that move between biomorphic abstraction and strict geometry.

 

Melkovics’s exhibitions—such as Chance of Waves in Budapest (2024), Panta Rhei in Szentendre (2022), and Morphologic in 2019—trace his growing visibility both in Hungary and internationally. His works are part of major public collections, including the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest and the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, and he has received multiple prestigious awards and residencies.

 

Overall, Melkovics’s practice combines intuition and rationality, playfulness and precision. His modular sculptures embody both physical presence and conceptual reflection, positioning him as one of the most exciting mid-career artists in the Hungarian contemporary art scene today.

 

Jovanovics Tamás (Budapest, 1974)

 

Tamás Jovanovics, born in 1974, has been living and working abroad for decades. His practice is rooted in modernist traditions, especially the line and the structure of the grid. From early on, he developed a highly consistent vocabulary based on dense parallel lines, first arranged on white backgrounds and later also on black, gradually incorporating vertical and diagonal structures as well.

 

His paintings are built on repetition, but instead of becoming rigid or overwhelming, they open up into what he calls an “all-over” principle. This approach allows the works to expand beyond the canvas, giving the sense that the lines and color variations could extend infinitely in every direction.

 

Over the years, his oeuvre has taken different forms. The most recent works combine two earlier series – the parallel straight lines and the sliced paintings. Here, rectangular canvases of different sizes, sometimes as many as nineteen, are joined together to form large composite works. These structures suggest both stability and movement, as if the panels could continue infinitely, while also connecting with almost magnetic intensity.

 

 

Tamás Soós, born in 1955, turned 70 this year, which became a key moment in his artistic journey. A recent inspiration came when, during Frieze in London, he discovered an English poetry book titled The Testament of Beauty. This encounter set the tone for his current reflections. Around the same time, he created a deeply personal work for his doughter Bori’s 40th birthday, titled Forty Touches of the Canvas.

 

Soós’s practice has long moved through phases – from resonance in his early works of the 1980s, to structure, and now to a focus on the fragile yet profound encounter between gesture and the blank canvas. His paintings often follow a rhythm that moves from dense compositions toward increasingly sparse surfaces, always questioning: how much is enough?

 

 

Márton Nemes was born in Hungary in 1986 and currently lives and works in Budapest. He studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and later completed his MFA at Chelsea College of Arts in London in 2018. He is a multimedia artist whose work is anything but ordinary. Most recently, he represented Hungary at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 with his solo show Techno Zen.

 

Nemes creates bold, vibrant paintings, sculptural objects, and large-scale installations. His pieces don’t just sit in a space — they transform it. Using fluorescent colors, reflective surfaces, and immersive lighting, he draws on the energy of techno and rave subcultures to create art that you feel as much as you see.

 

A key part of his creative process is his constant experimentation — whether that’s with new materials, unusual production methods, or multisensory setups. Nemes has a background in industrial design, and you can see that influence in the structure and technical precision of his work. He often uses techniques like PVC coating, laser-cutting, and materials like metal wires, mirrors, and cargo straps. Layers of steel and acrylic are stacked and fragmented to shift our sense of reality. His work pushes us to experience the present moment — and sometimes, to escape it entirely. To sum it up: his work bridges sound, light, color, and form to create powerful, immersive experiences that speak to the world we live in now.