Ákos Ezer navigates male, young protagonists with elongated and intertwined limbs into distinctive figure ensembles: a painterly symbiosis of captured moments from personal memories, reflecting the life of youth in his native Hungary and inviting associative continuation of the narrative.
In his third solo exhibition at Galerie Droste, the artist shows recent works whose motif of the play area is central and can be understood as a metaphor of his painting process. Titled LET'S MEET ON THE PLAYGROUND, Ezer curates an imaginary amusement park in the exhibition space, where the viewer can figure out how the depicted stories begin or end. Large-scale still images reveal subtle moments that take place in abandoned settings: Group compositions of young men, formed on a climbing frame or even in a shopping cart, on the one hand unconcerned with the responsibilities and burdens of adult life, but at the same time embodying a possible hopelessness in the everyday through stooped and contorted postures.
Thus, Ezer observes the reality of life of his contemporaries with a sharp eye and depicts the sometimes dreary everyday life with visible ductus on colorful, abstract backgrounds - a visual contradiction that may cause the attempt to humorously as well as dramatically refer to problems of the depicted protagonists. Fascinated on an art-historical level by the buzzing and moving space of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's famous painting "Children's Games", which inspired Ákos Ezer since the beginning of his studies, the narrative atmosphere of his works takes up with the pioneer of the Dutch peasant genre and develops his own visual language around the depiction of contemporary figures and objects, somewhere between staging and still life.
Ákos Ezer, born in 1989, lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2010.
