Gabor Kiraly: Blissful Idleness

About

Hungarian painter Gábor Király (b. 1979) originally trained as an art teacher, however, he always knew that he would not want to operate in the rigid framework of a high school. Being mostly inspired by his love of tribal art, Gábor rarely paints on traditional and tidy prefabricated canvases. Instead, he prefers to work with rough sackcloth or raw wood panels, sourcing them from small local Sunday markets and house-clearance events, believing in the power of circular economy and recycling in the creative process.

In his work, Gábor never attempts to smoothen the natural structure of his chosen organic materials but aims to actively incorporate it into his concepts. The artist has always taken a highly experimental approach to painting: his signature self-invented technique involves applying thick layers of acrylic paint onto the surface, then washing it all off using an industrial high-pressure water gun, the power of which damages the surface just enough to enhance the roughness of the texture even more.

The artistic process of Gábor very rarely includes conscious planning and it is usually quite intuitive. Most of his paintings document subconscious impressions of the individuals and animals inhabiting the artist’s environment. Though he was born and raised in Hungary, he also had the chance to live in Indianapolis in the United States, a time which he has fond memories of; particularly of the local Afro-American community, members of which he also incorporated into his portraiture. The characters appearing in his art, however, are never based on specific individuals. Although they are, to some extent, influenced by real-life people Gábor has met, the figures are fictitious, somewhat visually intimidating but painted with compassion, love and warmth. The artist sees their clumsy fragility as the representation of human fallibility.

For this exhibition, the artist and the gallery bring together 18 large and small scale works. Although at first glance, the raw and unpolished visual world of Gábor Király may strike us as unsettling, his paintings tell warm, intimate and personal stories of human nature.

“My figures may look intimidating at first glance, but I think they have at least as much love in them; I see mostly their fragility, which I believe dissolves this kind of clumsiness or grimness. I’m not even the type of person who would want to emphasize horror. A man, or for the matter of fact, an animal, as they are also familiar characters in my images, has lived a life in which not only good things happen. However, that doesn’t make them scary for me”, says the artist.