László Fehér is one of the most internationally renowned contemporary Hungarian painters - since the 1970s his art has been characterised by figurative, photo-based painting, which reflects on the issues of individual and collective memory and confronts the dilemmas of the present. His paintings usually transform seemingly banal, everyday events into timeless metaphors with universal, metaphysical dimensions.
 

László Fehér's art is characterized by both permanence and constant renewal: His photorealist works of the 1970s, often with political connotations, were replaced in the 1980s by more expressive works that still reflect on the question of memory, and at the end of the decade he returned to photographic expression, developing his own distinctive formal language, which was based on the relationship between spaces and planes reduced to abstract fields of colour, their objects, landscapes and architectural elements, and the ghostly, eloquent, lonely human figures reduced to a single contour, still evoking the collective and the personal (familiar) past. Fehér’s painting is characterised not only by a reduction in form but also in colour, with only two or three colours dominating his work, creating series of yellow-black, pink and silver in the late 1980s, and then, for a long period in the 1990s, using only black, white and grey tones, before returning to warmer shades of pink at the end of the decade. At the turn of the millennium, Fehér, once again turned to photorealistic representation, his works are dominated by monumentally enlarged human faces, moments of the present fading into memory, in which sharp contrasts of light and shadow and black and red colour pairings become prominent in the middle of the decade. In the 2010s, Fehér returns to the formal reductionism of the 1990s, but changes format, with the tondo format becoming dominant (Zoo Story I-II, 2010). In the middle of the decade, works on paper become more prominent than ever, with ink, ink pencil and gouache works that not only become more direct in expression, but also more fragile in the memories of a traumatic past that emerge from the black mass. In his larger-format works, which run parallel to these works, White returns to pink: the memorial images that emerge as traces and imprints on the acrylic surfaces appear as a kind of Memory Print, evoking a familiar and simultaneously unknown past.
 

Fehér’s most recent works continue this Memory Prints series: everyday scenes from the past reveal moments of a world that seems distant but is still familiar today -Dóri's Dream (2016), Edit with Ice Cream (2016), I'll be better next year (2024), Looking back on myself (2024). On the floating, ethereal pink surfaces, the past as an imprint of societies, eras and human existences is dissolved and recreated.
 

Alongside the pink commemorative prints, yellowish-toned compositions form a new group of works in his oeuvre. A key question and subject of László Fehér's photo-based art is the way of representation, the duality of the ephemeral body and the remaining traces, the elusiveness of the present that becomes transient before our eyes, the elusiveness of reality, which is also the central theme of the artist's latest exhibition at Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art. 

- Mónika Zsikla