Biography
Artworks
Movements

Árpád Forgó

Hungary • 1972

Biography

Árpád Forgó is interested in experimental painting, in the question of broadening the interpretation of non-figurative panel painting by keeping its painting feature and by exploring the borderline between painting and sculpture. His shaped canvas works are built from his pre-defined modular system, where structure, shape, measurements and rhythm as well as the planar and spatial relationships are in the focus of his research. He is intensively experimenting with materials in order to create different surfaces that characterise each of his works. In recent years, the rectangular modules were tilted and the new parallelogram-shaped modules made the compositions dynamic.

Árpád Forgó's works fit into the stream of contemporary art, which develops the heritage of abstraction with its own methods. The versatility of his compositions only opens up to the viewer when he moves in front of the work; surrounding space, air, light, shadow become part of it.

The artist, who lives in Budapest, clearly follows the tradition of Concrete Art, but expands it with a playful approach and a love of experimentation. Forgó creates works with a luminosity and colour intensity that offer us wonderfully sensual stimuli. He seduces the viewer to look closely and check whether he can believe his eyes. The subtle gradient of colour on a canvas, for example, is created by the curvature of a slightly three-dimensional stretched canvas. Here the artist explores the boundary between "shaped canvas" and object-like pictorial body. Yet his works always remain paintings and do not question it. The colours the artist uses radiate. The reflection of them on the wall extends the picture beyond its boundaries. The craft element of his mostly formally reduced constructions is always important and always of great appeal. Beauty and joy as a moment of experience are in successful dialogue with deliberate conceptual limitation.

Forgó was born in Budapest, Hungary. He has participated in group shows widely at galleries and museums, including Ludwig Museum and Vasarely Museum, Hungary; Museum Ritter, Germany; Mark Rothko Art Center, Latvia; and Griffin Gallery, UK. The artist had solo shows at Anya Tish Gallery, Houston, USA; Milano Gallery, Warsaw, Poland; Rómer Flóris Museum of Art and History and Viltin Gallery in Hungary. He has been invited to numerous artist-in-residence programs, including The Vermont Studio Center, USA; Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects, Australia; The Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China and most recently The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA. Currently he is a grantee of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Nationality

Hungarian artists