ARTIST STATEMENT

It is worth pondering that a photographer perceives only his or her reality although knows that the apparatus “sees” differently, but utilises it for mere expression. In contrast to this, a fine artist can maintain a much more synthesized connection with the chosen medium. It is somehow more unequivocal that the entity of the non-technical picture is just as important as of its maker’s. It does not only react to the world, but has mass and matter as well as extent. A handcrafted picture comes to life when the artist applies the substance to the carrier. It has never existed before that as a latent image, negative or digital file, hence its user cares more about the result. My attitude shows that I am also interested in the life of the image, I do not see my works as photographs.

From the start of the university I deal with the medium of photography as an open issue and am constantly searching for the link between it and painting, because it is not quite life-like that we want to isolate photography from any other fine art.

I mainly deal with abstract and concrete photography. My works always converge to painting somehow, trying to question and push the frontiers between it and photography. I use photography as a tool, but reach back to its essence repeatedly. Through the medium, but not with its proper usage I create my images using this to blur the boundaries. I believe that today we don’t have to separate photography from any other fine art and though it’s a technical process, I prove that light can be used as a brush. I intend to create a unique world of photographs rather than using photography to document or reproduce. An image can be made using abstraction to divide it from reality.

BIOGRAPHY

Máté Dobokay (b. 1988) is graduated at University of Kaposvár on Photography BA department. He received a Republican Scholarship for 2015‐2016, was shortlisted for the Leopold Bloom Award in 2015 and for the Esterházy Award also in 2017. During 2014 he was a member of the winning team at OFF_Festival, Bratislava and was nominated for the Lucien et Rodolf Hervé Prix. He won the first MODEM prize in 2018. He was the youngest artist in “IMPACT: Abstraction & Experiment in Hungarian Photography” exhibition in New York. He has been featured in several group shows in Europe and in the most important hungarian institutes as well, like Ludwig Museum, Vasarely Museum, MODEM, New Budapest Gallery and in Rómer Flóris Museum.