Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art is pleased to present In a Different Way, István Nádler's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

István Nádler (1938) was a member in the Zugló Circle from the early 1960s, then he was a participant in the neo-avant-garde movement that came to be in the mid-1960s and in the exhibitions Iparterv I (1968) and II (1969). His painting was at once linked to the Hungarian Constructivist avant-garde of Kassák and the universal neo-avant-garde of the time. The liberated self-development of his art was made possible by the discovery and deeper exploration of lyrical abstraction in the 1960s. At the time, he studied the work of Jean René Bazaine, Pierre Soulages, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Afred Manessier with his friends Sándor Molnár, Imre Bak and Paul Deim. He then became acquainted with the rougher and more dramatic gesture painting of American Abstract Expressionism. Early in his creative career, he drew on these two sources of inspiration to create his own individual world of painting. Influenced by the strictly structural hard edge, the geometric phase of his painting was marked by the use of homogeneous colour surfaces and folklore elements, including the Avar motif, which became a symbol of the Central and Eastern European cultural tradition in his work. As his monographer Lóránd Hegyi pointed out, "In Nádler's art, the homogeneous surface of colour, [...] the inner glow, and the radiance of colour, heats up the geometric structures." In the 1970s, the experience of music and landscape had a great influence on the development of his oeuvre: through Bartók's music he became accustomed to the world of folk art and discovered the creative attitude of the archaic man. In the 1980s, also influenced by musical models - the works of John Cage, Steve Reich, György Kurtág, László Sáry, László Vidovszky, Zoltán Jeney - the era of Nádler's new painterly era began with unparalleled force. During this period, his palette brightened and the character of his compositions returned to the lyrically emotional, more relaxed painting of his early career. Like his neo-avant-garde peers of his generation, he also played a significant role in the new painting movement that was emerging at this time. In 1984, he found the ‘major motif'. Influenced by the Suprematist paintings of Kazimir Malevich and his infamous works (such as Yellow Quadrilateral on White Ground, 1917-18), Nádler created his own visual world.

Malevich's work accompanies Nádler’s artistic career as an important art historic reference. The 'cross' dedicated to the artist is in fact an emblem of self-identification linked to his earlier geometric works. Transformed and reevaluated, this emblem was later incorporated into his lyrical painting as a symbolic shape. As Dávid Fehér pointed out in relation to Nádler's cycle Seven Last Words: 'the crosses are in fact overlapping parallelograms: coffin-like, yet luminous figures that also evoke the almost mythical defining motif of Nádler's oeuvre, Kazimir Malevich’s yellowish parallelogram dissolving in space'. This motif is both a point of connection to universal art and a constant reference to his personal lore.

His sojourns in Italy in the 1990s enriched his art with new colours and forms, which shines through in his Roman and Florentine series. In the second half of the decade, his sensual painting returned to geometry. The 2000s can be seen as the period of black paintings, when black gestures were written in the infinite dimension of black compositions, almost only emerging in raking light. Nádler’s art then shifted away from the black on black endpoint and back to bright colours. The 2010s were marked by a return to the geometric forms of the hard edge, the rigour of which Nádler blended with the ease of gestural (informal) painting.

After the pandemic, István Nádler began painting a new series in 2021, in which he no longer sought to reach towards the transcendent in his compositions, but on the contrary, he created his compositions starting from and lingering in transcendent space. As he moved between dimensions, he found a central axis linking the opposites of transcendence and material space, "harmonising" them, which in 2024 led him to the idea of developing a new theme. His latest series is primarily inspired by the desire to paint in a different way than before, and this intention is incidentally the title of this exhibition. Despite his stated ambition, however, the basis remains the same: Nádler still seems to seek to capture and visually convey the transcendental dimension of the sensual world through the material means of painting. This paradox holds true for almost all of his oeuvre, but his latest series shows a complete disconnect from his earlier practice, which had incepted from and concentrated on the relationship between colours. In his recent works, the base is white, which signifies space. The expressive gestures of the colours splashed on the snow-white canvases of the series, drawn with a rubber brush, primarily display the forms of the universally known shapes - the triangle, the circle, the square and their relation to each other. Thus, the pictorial constellations of disembodied gestures that come to life in successive compositions can best be interpreted as stages in a problematic unfolding in painting. These can be seen as snapshots of the process of moving from the image of gestures visualized in the infinity of white spaces (Fb. 1 - Fb. 15 ) to the axis of harmony (Fb. 16- Fb. 19) of the (ideal) central space connecting the dimensions. In each composition, several directions of this "painterly movement" are articulated, resulting in the creation of painterly qualities that cancel each other out and/or blend into each other. The sterile homogeneity of the whiteness of the spaces is dissolved by the scattered nature of the paint splattered on the canvas, and the resulting splashes of paint are forced into a grooved order by the hardness of the rubber brushes. The paint splatters, mixed to a thinner consistency, occasionally dripped down, become an organic part of the individual compositions by virtue of their self-administered nature.

 

 

//Mónika Zsikla//