Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to present the second solo exhibition of Károly Keserü in London. mikrokozmosz features new paintings and works on paper by the Hungarian artist and includes two stunning new works from the recently commenced series of paintings on perspex.
A catalogue entitled “Károly Keserü – London works 2000 to 2009” will be published on the occasion of the exhibition with an introductory text by Chris Townsend.
mikrokozmosz explores Keserü’s ongoing motif and its variations: the relationship between the grid and the dot, the identifying mark of all his paintings. For the first time on show will be Keserü’s works on paper that reveal the same repetitive attention to detail yet much more playfulness and freedom.
Keserü’s method of creation, though obsessive and extremely meticulous, is fairly straightforward.
A grid is established through a matrix of thread, which is laid into clear resin onto the canvas. Subsequently dots of different colours are randomly placed within the small squares formed by the thread.
Despite the orderliness of the grid’s construction, the placement of the dots rarely follows a system resulting in nebulous clouds of colour in differing densities. In his latest canvases even the background colours shift due to the use of coloured thread.
The non-referential and purely abstract notion of Keserü’s canvases and perspex paintings makes any theoretical interpretation of the work somehow obsolete. The complex compositions take the eye of the beholder simply on a journey while triggering his imagination and evoking images and emotions.
A connection to music is evident through the artist’s passion for Bach and contemporary music. Another source of inspiration is science, philosophy and religion, the transgression of Western and Eastern ideas.
“A grand yet subtle game” as the artist comments himself, “a fine balance between the playful and the serious-it always remains just a fragment of the whole. …According to quantum physics an infinite number of parallel universes exist. This discovery … in fact applies to everything and everyone. The possibilities in life are literary endless, so it is actually beyond our comprehension. This is what my works are trying to express and illustrate: an approximation of conception of infinity…”
Born in Hungary, Karoly Keserü studied art for five years in Melbourne where he won Australia’s most prestigious ‘Samstag’ scholarship and completed his MFA at Central saint Martins in 2001. His works are exhibited and collected widely in Europe, US and Australia. In 2004 he was selected for the ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’. In 2006 he was included in Chris Townsend’s book on the artist’s generation after YBA, ‘New Art from London’.
mikrokozmosz is coinciding with Karoly Keserü’s show at the Hungarian Cultural Centre, 10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7NA from the 18thFebruary to 12th March 2009. For more information please visit www.hungary.co.uk