Neue Dialoge

An artistic dialogue between the painters Tibor Pogonyi and Marten Kirbach which throws the historically evolved dualism between abstract and figurative painting out of the window. The focus is on the existential struggle of painting and people in times of the digital modern. Kirbach’s abstract works call for unconditional contemplation and critical questioning of one’s own perception in an everyday world characterized by accelerated experiences, virtual reality constructs and the conflict between the inner and the outer. In the critical examination of painting per se and its elements, he confronts the viewer with a pictorial reality that is just as ambivalent, and which tries to newly differentiate the relationship between perception and reality, copy and depiction, illusion and truth, with overlaying, breaks in perspective, spatial conflicts, overlapping and penetrations. Picking up on the formal language of the old masters, Tibor Pogonyi’s vibrant paintings “draw in” viewers, an effect they find difficult to escape. In his works, he grapples with the existentialist questions of the human condition and of painting. Accordingly, against the perfection of his technical mastery – on both the formal and the content level – he quite specifically sets the emphasis in his paintings on the imperfect, on the incomplete and on the break. Against the backdrop of a digital modern demythologized and streamlined by algorithms and artificial intelligence, his both visually stunning and mystically charged work seems like a radical counter plan that, with the force of its pathos, leads people back to the roots of their being and their own identity.