László Szilágyi Street Gallery's current exhibition is Ádám Albert Memorial Inflation
Small Eastern European states like Hungary, battered by the stormy 20th century are painfully confronted with the devaluation of monuments with every regime change. What if we erected abstract monuments that are appropriately solemn and distinguished - only without the information that later becomes embarrassing? No name, no image, just empty shapes. This is what Ádám Albert does: he draws schematised monumental structures and embraces the most basic visual forms - the circle, the triangle and the square - with laurel leaves. There are no names under the coats of arms, only a grey field, but the primary colours (red, yellow, blue) familiar from the colour mix refer to the Bauhaus and classical modernism, while a small martinet statue cast in aluminium watches - with a touch of melancholy - the fall of the systems and the devaluation of the monuments. There is no 'empty' monument, each sterile form, crest, moulding and architecture embodying history.
Ádám Albert was born in 1975 in Veszprém, where he completed his secondary school studies where he is still teaching.
In his artistic approach he reflects on different aspects of the means and methods of cultural transmission, i.e. knowledge production, taking into account their changing forms in historical time and geographical space. These socio-political issues are addressed through aesthetics and through art.
In 2007 he was awarded the first prize of the ESSL Award. His most recent solo exhibition, Bauxite Crisis was held at the Kisterem Gallery (2014) and was included in the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition [Silence] - a Holocaust exhibition. His works can be seen in the Hungarian National Gallery's permanent exhibition of Hungarian art after 1945, entitled Lépésváltás (Change of Step).
The artist lives and works in Budapest.
