Artists

Károly Hopp-Halász

Press release

The third installment of the exhibition series re-examining the work of Károly Hopp-Halász (1946–2016) from the 1980s and 1990s opens two months before the tenth anniversary of the artist's death. Titled Monolithic Structures, it focuses on the body of work and the broader creative period associated with this series. The works created in this spirit—including paintings, works on paper, and unstretched canvases—were composed from modules, a method characteristic of the artist's practice. They consist of continuous monochrome surfaces complemented by a repertoire of motifs familiar from the neo-geo works and a distinctive post-geometric visual language, most notably fields of dots. Hopp-Halász further developed the conceptual implications of these compositions through installations based on his characteristic principle of open-ended structures capable of extending infinitely in every direction. At the center of the exhibition are the large-scale installation originally presented under the title Szekszárd Installation (Municipal Gallery, Szekszárd, 1989) and the sculptural ensemble Monolithic Structure/Untitled (1987-1989). Within these rigorously constructed compositions, dots applied at the intersections of the folds—using the canvas as a modernist grid—interact with monochrome "beams" that project the continuous fields of color into space, as well as with elements of the artist's everyday material environment, including baskets, demijohns, Danube oars, and chairs.