curator: Sári Stenczer
Lumen Gallery’s first show to greet the spring presents Éva Szombat, whose photographs distort, brim over with and exaggerate reality, drawing on the milieu of the phoney present, binding its never withering artificial flowers into a lavish bouquet. The photographer offers irony as a natural remedy for post-winter depression, with instant effect, its recipe provided by the mystified, quotidian artificial nature.
However, the photographs of the young artist were made outside the lamp-heated atmosphere of the studio. In fact, as the exhibition’s title suggests, she accumulates the customary and boring, the quotidian environment, in other words, the banal, evoking our illusory, pretentious realities – the deceiving possibilities of artificial studios.
The bizarre details of Éva Szombat’s images represent the unusual in accordance with the codes of the willingly or unwillingly adopted consumer culture. They simultaneously entertain and thrill, are at once masterfully comical and painfully kitschy. They expressively show that their author is one of the most distinct members of the new generation, who, rather than concealing it, self-ironically accepts the fact that her artistic adulthood takes place within the scenery of Photoshop, the mass-product and the digital image, while the creative process is in the focal point of her works.
Since its establishment, one of Lumen Gallery’s objectives has been to provide opportunity for an emerging young photographer each year to individually show their works. This opportunity has been granted this March to MOME’s fourth year student Éva Szombat (1987, Kaposvár), who, despite her young age, has been regularly invited to perfectly employ and modify current trends with her fresh vision and at once challenging and captivating ideas, giving a broader interpretation of our contemporary “artificial world”.
