Exhibition: June 12 – July 30
Venue: Virág Judit Gallery

Eszter Radák: Here again!

Eszter Radák (1971, Budapest) is one of the most educated, practiced and successful artists in the contemporary Hungarian art scene. She is a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, a resigning rector who has been painting for more than 30 years.

In her most recent solo show at the Virág Judit Gallery, landscapes played a major role despite the fact that “painting an art historically valid landscape in the 21st Century is terribly difficult.” (Eszter Radák – Alinda, April 28, 2017) In her latest works however, the interiors in every sense become very emphasized. In Radák’s new paintings the usual wide, endless horizons are compressed, the perspective of the images narrows and the viewer also encounters photographic cuts – the forced closure caused by the pandemic does not go away without a trace.

Rich in painterly and art historical quotations, Radak’s virtuoso, loud and pastose colour fields /David Hockney/ are bordered by strong contours /József Rippl-Rónai, Ilka Gedő/. The view is concentrated, and the rich, multi-layered, playful surfaces sometimes step out of the two-dimensional plane of the stretched canvas.

The exhibition also features numbered digital paintings, which can be considered as genre experimentations by Radák.

These images with striking titles, swelled with spiritual and artistic freedom carry dramatic and light content at the same time. The endless sarcasm, cheerfulness and original humour of the works executed with great pictorial knowledge is what makes the art of Eszter Radák really lovable.