Adam Magyar: Kontinuum

About

Hungarian born and Berlin based, Magyar works internationally to create images of individuals in the urban environment. Commuting on trains and walking in the morning hours, in what he describes as the “in-between times”, he captures the missed moments that we often fail to notice or value. He began to create the moving images in Berlin and the still images in Shanghai and has now worked in Tokyo, Beijing, Mumbai, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and Rome. Magyar states that he is searching for the commonality among people, not their differences. Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space, stretching seconds into minutes and freezing moments impossible to see with the naked eye.

To manifest his ideas and vision he has worked with great intensity and focus in developing equipment and software. The technical preparation is long, and is always undergoing further refinement. Magyar has worked for several years with the three distinct formats represented in our show, sticking with the same themes, and continuously distilling and polishing. This exhibition offers the opportunity to see his most recent results after having been previously shown individually in group shows and art fairs over the last several years; most recently in the current exhibition at the New York Public Library and The Transformer Station in Cleveland.

The video works are captured using a high-speed industrial video camera that Magyar adapted to extend a twelve second exposure into twelve minutes, rendered with remarkable clarity. The Stainless photographs also utilize an industrial camera with customized software, but are shot from the platform of the train as it is moving, pulling into the station. Each photograph presents a detailed view inside the subway cars that removes perspective and illuminates the figures inside, forming almost studio-like portraits. The Urban Flow works are perhaps the uncanniest portrayals of the individual in the city. Here he uses a homemade slit scan camera to create long narrow processional images in which the individuals are morphed and merged with their surroundings.

Magyar’s acute observation of the individual moving through the modern world is both clinical and poignant. The application of his vision to an international scope brings home our ever-increasing realization that we are all in this together.

Magyar was born in 1972 and raised in the Eastern Hungarian town of Debrecen and following studies in music and technology he dropped out of college and is self taught as an artist. He has been exhibiting for ten years internationally with US solo shows at Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Center for Photography, and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

He has been written about extensively, and an in-depth article published on line in Matter (January 2014) can be found at http://bit.ly/1gSCi4c and a link can be found on our website, along with a recent video interview with Barbara Woolsey.

Conversation between Adam Magyar and Andrew Zolli, Saturday, March 28, 2 pm