Selection of Paper Works by András Böröcz from the 1970s and 1980s
The current exhibition at Einspach & Czapolai presents drawings, collages, and paper works created by András Böröcz in the 1970s and 1980s. These works are closely connected to the legendary performances he created together with László Révész during the period, while also functioning as autonomous visual universes in their own right. A significant portion of the works was produced in Hungary, and later, following Böröcz’s emigration in 1986, in New York. Within Böröcz’s universe, the drawings and collages operate as open pictorial spaces in which various motifs and associations are layered upon one another again and again, while the time-based, ephemeral gestures of the performances become fixed as images.
Yet these works are not merely documentation or ‘by-products’ of the actions. Rather, they can be understood as fragments of a conceptual and motivational network developing parallel to the performances: autonomous visual constructions in which surrealism, absurd humor, mythological references, and personal memory intertwine in singular ways.
In Böröcz’s works, recurring motifs - such as the sphere, watermelon, egg, chimney, well, coffin, ladder, matchstick, or vinyl record - do not appear as symbols with stable meanings, but as continuously evolving visual topoi. In some drawings they become cosmic objects; elsewhere grotesque everyday utensils; elsewhere again anthropomorphic figures or theatrical stage props. Through the repetition of these motifs, Böröcz developed a distinctive visual language that simultaneously draws on the freedom of childlike association, Dadaist image-associations, and the intermedial thinking of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde.
At the same time, Böröcz’s drawings are not merely traces of a historical period. They are surreal constellations built from the constant slippage between personal and historical memory, playfulness and threat, humor and tragedy. The world of grotesque figures, twisting chimneys, wells, coffee-factory scenes, penguins, watermelon-headed characters, chimney sweeps, and floating vinyl records arranged into formations simultaneously evokes theatrical tableaux, dreamlike visions, and the memory of historical trauma.
The exhibited works are deeply informed by the alternative artistic milieu of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the intermedial thinking associated with the underground art courses organized around Miklós Erdély (INDIGO, FAFEJ), as well as the Young Artists’ Club. At the same time, the paper works reveal with particular sensitivity one of the central characteristics of Böröcz’s thinking: the way in which the image functions not as a closed composition, but as a constantly shifting field of associations. Motifs migrate from one work to another and acquire new roles according to new organizing principles. Their meanings continually transform, while increasingly dense networks of relations and ever broader associative fields emerge between them.
The drawings and collages, therefore, should not simply be regarded as illustrations or preparatory studies for the performances. Together with - or even without - the documentation, they constitute an open-ended imaginary world built through free association.
The exhibition sets out to map this distinctive visual universe: it focuses on the moment when performative thinking becomes image, everyday objects are transformed into motifs through free association, and improvisation evolves into an autonomous visual system in the art of András Böröcz.
- Mónika Zsikla
