Balázs Kicsiny

Exact Time

An installation of thirty paintings with the dual video projection of
The Cobbler's Apprentice and Interview in the Pump Room

March 7th-April 29th, 2006

For the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, Balázs Kicsiny created a suite of distinct, loosely connected—and related—works. This exhibition presents key parts of what was entitled An Experiment in Navigation, and also studies for—and elaborations on—his installation at the Hungarian pavilion.

Balázs Kicsiny's concern is orientation: the finding of physical and spiritual place. Obsessed by the contingency of time and space, in the paintings on view, he keeps reintroducing the motives he used throughout his creative life: dials, anchors, and chains.

"In The Cobbler's Apprentice," Marcia Vetrocq wrote in her review of the Venice Biennale in the September 2005 issue of Art in America, "a vertiginous video projected on the floor...a Dali meets Hitchcock timepiece with oversized Roman numerals rotates counterclockwise. Veiled women in black and white, like a nefarious chamber ensemble, occupy workbenches; the 'apprentice' creeps around the perimeter; and a prone figure, identified as the Wandering Jew, replaces the hands of the clock with his own limbs and walking stick. In Kicsiny's realm, progress is thwarted, time runs backward and travel is not liberty but damnation,"

Interview in the Pump Room was made during last year's international conference "Inclusive Europe." Ministers of Culture from various countries of the European Union were being interviewed by journalists among the figures of the Biennale's Pump Room—twelve pajamaclad, rubber booted male figures drinking from chalices, wearing diving helmets—in a temporary installation at the Palace of the Arts in Budapest, with Balázs Kicsiny documenting this unlikely event.

The exhibition will continue at the Hungarian Cultural Center, NY (April 26 - May 21) with the installation of the Biennale's Winterreise.

For more information about the artist click here