Exhibition of our Photography Professors in Barcelona

The background can highlight, obscure, frame, add depth or even transubstantiate. It photographic meaning-making role, though almost imperceptible, is more important than we think. It is safe to say that the exhibition's images are linked by the examination of this element of composition. And something else provided by the contextual meaning of the keyword; background as a base, a starting point, a support: a metaphor for a teaching staff that provides the backbone of university education.

                                                               

Location: Valid World Hall, Carrer de Buenaventura Muñoz, 6, 08018 Barcelona, Spain

Opening event: 16 December 2019 from 7:30 pm

The exhibition will be open between 16-22. December 2019.

Exhibiting Artists:

- Bátori Zsolt
- Gőbölyös Luca
- Nánási László
- Pettendi Szabó Péter
- Szabó Dezső 

Curator:

Tóth Balázs Zoltán esthete

Bátori Zsolt: Memories

Zsolt Bátori holds a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University in the United States. He specialized in art theory and is particularly interested in photography. He has lectured at numerous universities around the world. He also deals with the creative side of photography. Zsolt Bátori is the Dean of METU Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries.

In his series “Memories”, he has blended real and imagined memories together to create an alter ego which is made of possible memories of an existing and imagined life.

© Bátori Zsolt

Gőbölyös Luca:  Background

After graduation from the Secondary School of Visual Arts, Budapest, she acquired her technical skills in photography at the Paris studio of Jean-Loup Charmet, and then graduated in 1994 from the Photography Program of the Hungarian College of Applied Arts. She finished her doctoral studies in 2005 at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In addition to numerous awards and scholarships, she was awarded the Rudolf Balogh Award in 2007. Luca Gőbölyös is the Head of Bachelors and Master's Degree Programs in Photography at METU.

Her Background series was based on fantastic collection: 19th-century Victorian infant and toddler photography. In the 1850s and 1870s exposure time was so long that they could not photograph infants alone because they would have moved, but their mother could keep them in her lap with safety and in peace. The interesting thing about these pictures is that the mother was covered so she would more or less be present in the background, or she would become the backdrop to these studio portraits of children. (...)

I gave birth in July, which made a big difference to my intensive working life. My background series deals with the nature, location and judgment of this new role and task. The photos I started with were so touching that I started taking such pictures of my little daughter, Alma. Hiding in the pictures or peeking out from behind the veil sheds another light on the role of mother, which has become heroic in daily politics. (...)

 
© Gőbölyös Luca

Nánási László: Panel Painting

In 2009 he graduated from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Between 2009 and 2011 he was the secretary of the Youth Photography Studio. He is the managing director of Fotografit Studio; besides this he is an instructor at the Photography BA Program at METU.

The metal frameworks of the broken billboards, like a kind of drawing frame, redefine the view. What is interesting on the board is not what it shows, but what it covers. Where there seems to be nothing, the frame like an open window, forms an image: it claims that it is something there, that only a frame is required for understanding. And the picture hidden by the blackboard is the canvas itself.

     
© Nánási László

Pettendi Szabó Péter: Background

Have you ever been to Budapest?

After graduating from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2012, Péter Pettendi Szabó he has been working as a lecturer in photography at Budapest Metropolitan University. In the same year, he began his doctoral studies at the University of Fine Arts. He was awarded József Pécsi (2005) and LászlóMoholy-Nagy (2009) scholarships. Between 2012 and 2016 he was a member of the Pécsi József Scholarship Board.

In our society, there is a growing gap between the opportunities of people living in settlements with different infrastructures. It can be said that the technological development (eg information network) of a given place determines the chances of its inhabitants. This is a source of increasing tension. The country is still characterized by the significance of Budapest.

Most of the pictures show communities, families, people, who, although living in Hungary have never been to the capital.

In my work, BACKGROUND, I draw on the tradition of wanderer photographers - the habit of photographing against a painted background of the desired World. However, unlike in the old times, at the same moment I am taking two shots, one of the image of the desired World and the other one of the real living environment.

 
© Pettendi Szabó Péter

Szabó Dezső: Process

He graduated from Painting in 1995 as a student of ZsigmondKárolyi at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. From 1995 he had postgraduate education, and in 1997 he received his master's degree in painting. He is a winner of the LipótHermann and Munkácsy Mihály Prizes. Since 2011 he has been an Associate Professor of the Photography BA program at Budapest Metropolitan University.

His work captures modelled scenes from cut-out stills of aerial and natural disasters, various natural phenomena, mysterious locations, deep-sea footage, mostly from television broadcasts. By recreating the the image, he asks about the mechanism of the operation of images and their current status. In his Process series he describes the background to the creation of the constructed photographs, the workflow. The series is a sort of break between the ouvre created in the late nineties and the post-2010 works analysing other aspects of the medium of photography.

       
© Szabó Dezső

2019. 12. 16.