KOSTKA GALLERY, MEETFACTORY, PRAGUE (CZ)
Some arrange domestic archives of photos, videos or facebook albums, while others set aside significant moments in the form of cinema tickets or stamps in one’s passport. What if the thing you wish to keep in your memory is not a birthday party, recollection of your first date or your first trip to Italy, but a complex of emotions, fragrances and unspecified moments you spent somewhere almost banal – in the forest behind your house?
In his exhibition at the Kostka Gallery, Hungarian artist
Gábor Koós captured the slow, subtle passage of time in his closest
neighborhood. Both the forest where he spent the years of his childhood and
adolescene, and the long and intimate moments he enjoyed with his fatherand
granddad – both of whom were so familiar with South Slovakian nature – here
become a monochrome, emotional graphic landscape full of lines and folds,
trees, leaves and brak. The imprints of the trees, here reduced down to an
almost sculptural gesture, are not just a memory recording or reconstruction of
a remote souvenir; but also an update of a personal history at a particular
place. They all were created by means of genuine imprints of actual trees, by
physical contact of the artist with his so well known reality and with the
contemporary shape oh “his” forest. The Twenty Years’ Forest installation connects two approaches
characteristic of Koós’ creation: imprints of objects from his closest
neighborhood and monumental woodcuts.
The graphic map of the once lived through forest, assuming new life in the gallery
space, may not render the smell of tree leaves and needles, but points out how
important it is to capture one’s emotions and recollections before they
disappear.
Gábor Koós (1986) born in Lucenec, Slovakia, lives and works in Budapest.
Graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest. He is the
holder of several distincsons, e.g. the prestigious Gyula Derkovits Art
Scholarship, or the Hungarian Association of Graphic Artist Award. The art
gallery representing him is Chimera Project Gallery in Budapest.
Zuzana Jakalová
