Brushless strokes exhibition
September 23, 2022 - January 15, 2023
Curator: Blanka Bán
The series is inspired by the artist's idea that there are two major groups of abstract painting; abstract painting that relies on free gestures and momentary intuition, and abstract painting that relies on precision rather than chance, and is based on pre-designed, fixed forms. While his own works tend to fall into the latter group, he gives the illusion of belonging to the former. By his own admission, he finds it amusing to confuse his viewers, as the human brain basically tends to select and simplify visual information, trying to give a simple answer to the question "what am I seeing here?".
Alexandra Hegedűs was born in 1991 in Csongrád and grew up in Szeged. She first studied painting, drawing, textile art and art history at the Tömörkény István Secondary School of Art. After high school he wanted to learn the special genre of textile sculpture, but due to the lack of such a home opportunity he enrolled at the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs.
At the university he studied painting, art history, art anatomy, art psychology and other subjects. He spent a semester at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, mainly in Pécs, Budapest and some small towns in neighbouring countries. She won third place in the painting section of the National Students' Conference, the Fundamenta Amadeus Program scholarship in 2013 and 2014, the University's Ildikó Kriszbacher scholarship in 2015, and finally the New National Excellence Program scholarship in 2016.
Alexandra started experimenting with unconventional materials in her painting with the encouragement of her teachers and her master, Peter Somody, and her own curious nature, which she continues to do to this day. Her fine arts degree, on the other hand, was a thesis on textile sculpture. She then studied art socialisation and museum education at the Faculty of Teacher Education, working with the Janus Pannonius Museum and some local schools. Alexandra exhibited her first mature works under the title Alak-Anyag at the Reg Frühstücki Bár in Pécs in 2017.
The following summer she travelled to the United States with her husband. During her two years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she worked as a teaching assistant and volunteered at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She had the opportunity to exhibit her work in the Riverwest Art Walk, an event that has been running since the 1970s.
In 2019, after a few months in Milan, where she had an exhibition at M.A.D.S Gallery, she returned to Hungary and settled in Budapest. Since September 2021, she has been a museum educator at the Hungarian National Gallery.
At the end of 2019, abstraction took over in her painting, with material and form becoming the main protagonists of her work, as her technical experiments led her to find figuration ultimately futile and limiting. Although his painting has taken several seemingly completely different directions over the last ten years, his ideas have always been rooted in his interest in illusion.
His most recent works show at first glance giant brushstrokes following simple compositional schemes (circle, spiral, X, straight and curved lines, zigzag, etc.) that could be considered gesture painting. However, on closer inspection, we discover that we have been deceived; there are no free-hand gestural brushstrokes here. Alexandra builds up the paintings layer by layer, using a carefully planned and painstakingly long process of cut-out stencils, acrylic spray and a mixture of various coloured varnishes and adhesives. Observing the details, we can discover the play of covering and translucency of the different layers. The series is inspired by the artist's idea that there are essentially two broad categories of abstract painting; abstract painting that relies on free gestures and momentary intuition, and abstract painting that relies on precision rather than chance, and is based on pre-designed, fixed forms. While his own works tend to fall into the latter group, he gives the illusion of belonging to the former. By his own admission, he finds it amusing to confuse his viewers, as the human brain basically tends to select and simplify visual information, trying to give a simple answer to the question "what am I seeing here?".
