Artists

Gabriel Rózsa

Press release

The photographic series Pieces of a Whole by Gabriel Rózsa shows 13 wooden building blocks, originally designed as children’s toys. These are elementary geometric bodies – cubes, triangles, cuboids – which are isolated and systematically placed in the picture. Each building block is shown individually; the picture frames are in the respective complementary colors of the objects. The building blocks themselves are in the four primary colors – red, blue, yellow and green. Their pop colors are reminiscent of the clear, block-like color scheme of classic building blocks.

The series is complemented by a spatial installation: the photographed building blocks appear as physical objects in their original size in the exhibition space – not in color, however, but in black and white. This translation from colored image to achromatic object thematizes the cross-media transfer of color into tonal value. The reduction refers to central principles of analog photography: the transformation of reality into an abstract visual language.

Rózsa’s work sees itself as a formal investigation. Photography is not used as a means of narration, but serves to catalog, compare and order. The building blocks do not function as toys in the true sense of the word, but as experimental arrangements – neutrally staged, detached from function and context of use.

The work also refers to biographical experiences: Rózsa remembers car journeys between Austria and Hungary in his childhood. The places where he crossed the border and their architecture – places of control, structure and formal rigor – were particularly formative. In an earlier work, he takes up this theme directly; here it is present as a conceptual background foil.

Pieces of a Whole revolves around questions of modularity, repeatability and systematics – concepts that can be applied both to the principle of building blocks and to photographic processes. The relationship between part and whole, individual and system, construction and deconstruction is thematized as well as the connection between play, order and memory.

The building blocks, taken from the world of children’s play, can be read both as prototypes of an architecture of order and as manifestations of social processes. In the children’s play behavior, however, these structures are constantly torn down, reassembled and tested for their suitability – a process of permanent revision and renegotiation.

Text: Andreas, Duscha, 2025