Gábor Ösz (Online Gallery)

GALLERY | BIO | ARTIST’S STATEMENT | INTERVIEW

ARTMargins is pleased to present the work of Hungarian-born artist Gábor Ösz. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Ösz pursued postgraduate studies at the Rijksacademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam, where he has lived ever since. Ösz’s photographic and video work is conceptual yet pervaded by a strong sense of the importance of the medium. Among Ösz’s best known works are On the Edge (1998), a minimalist video work that can be viewed as a study of dimensions. In the project Liquid Horizon (1998-2002) Ösz uses as cameras WW II-era bunkers that were once part of the Atlantic wall. After this, Ösz produced several architecture-related projects that used the technique of Camera Obscura. He called this series Camera Architectura. It contains projects such as Prora Project and Constructed View. In Travelling Landscape (2002) a train functions as the camera, while in Permanent Daylight (2003-04) the camera function is carried out by a caravan.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Born in 1962, Dunaújváros (Hungary)
Lives and works in Amsterdam
www.gaborosz.com

Scholarships & Awards

Selected Solo Exhibition

Selected Group Shows

Publications

Films

Public Collections

• Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL)
• Gemeentemuseum The Hague (NL)
• Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art (H)
• Frac Franche-Conté (FR)
• Modern Múzeum, Pécs (H)
• Museum Schloss Moyland (D)
• Achmea Kunstcollectie (NL)
• Rabo Bank Collection (NL)

Press Reviews

Representation

• Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris;
• Zoetendaal Collections, Amsterdam

Artist’s Statement

To achieve the optical effect of black, you need colors in printing. To experience the sensation of absolute black, all three primary colors must be added. Therefore, black represents the totality of colors. However, the whiteness of paper could also indicate the presence of light, and white light could at the same time be considered the totality of colors, while black could be interpreted as the complete lack of light.

In other words, black and white each represent colors. Black is a borderline, extreme case, if you like, as is white. Separately, both represent absence, or nothingness, which is in itself the same as totality.

Black and white are cross-referential signs: they complement each other. Their joint image is the sign of yin and yang. The letter is black, the paper is white, which implies that thoughts are black and the space between them is white. But the printed text fades into grey on the paper. The shades of grey at the same time indicate the presence of both white and black, while there is no white in black, and no black in white. Grey is the sign of refraction of light; it is a transitory state between light and darkness. A room hermetically sealed from light gives people the physical sensation of blackness, which is similar to the dark chamber of a camera obscura. After the wall has been fitted with photosensitive paper, the small aperture is opened and light shines through, giving meaning to space. The walls delimiting space reflect the real, inverted image of the outside world and also determine the size of the projected image on paper.

In total darkness, a particular representation of light is created: the image and its exposure, the photosynthesis.

Interview – February, 2006

Barnabás Bencsik: You graduated as a painter at the Budapest Academy, and you went on to paint for quite some time, but later gave up traditional painting. What prompted the decision?

Gábor Ösz: Painting as a medium was increasingly unwieldy, and thanks to photography, I became interested in other materials as well. When I was attending, the Budapest Academy was very traditionalistic. I made my postgraduate studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and I found its modern workshops very inspiring, and using new materials was a challenge in itself. What changed was not my approach but the method. I started making films, and installations in which the film was featured both as image and material.

B.B.: The works you made in the middle of the 1990’s are defined by light, and the relationship of light and space. You were initially interested in projected images, then you turned to pure light. You were using extremely simple, minimalistic effects in those installations. Were you fascinated by the mystical, transcendental character of light? Or was it something else that encouraged you to study light, instead of the image?

G.Ö.: Both film and photography pushed me towards light; image and light became inseparable parallels for me. I wasn’t so much losing sight of the image as shifting the emphasis towards the other side. Though I recently returned to film, I have different intentions. Nevertheless, I keep on examining the status of light: in Travelling Landscapes, a project relying on the relationship of still and moving images, I used the sleeping car in a train as the camera, following the principles of the camera obscura. After the window was shaded and a pinhole was made on the screen, I hung a large sheet of photographic paper in the compartment to capture the image of the speeding landscape. During exposure, I was filming the small hole with a video camera. The hole appears as a sign of light in the dark space. As I zoom in on the hole, the vision behind the hole appears, and it is identical with what is projected onto the photographic paper. In a simultaneity of two terminal points, the digital camera is recording, as it were, a double image through the hole of the camera obscura: light and its image. Later I made an endless loop of this 9-second shot, thanks to which the doubled image of reality appears as the endless exposure of a journey. This was a kind of experiment to observe the coincidence of the photographic image and the window of the train. It may have been more than a mere coincidence that trains and photography appeared almost at the same time in the 19th century. While photography provided a tool to record the technical image, the window of the train animated the passing landscape. New dimensions of visual perception opened. You could say that while the camera obscura was transformed into a technical image, the first cinematic experience was provided by the train compartment.

B.B.: What made you turn to that most archaic of analogue techniques, the camera obscura? Was it that you first found the medium and then the subject, or the other way round?

G.Ö.: When trying to find solutions for a task, technique will provide numberless answers. Form is finding the idea. It all depends on to what extent the task determines the technique, and vice versa. While formerly I was trying to find out what the image is, now I am more interested in seeing how something becomes an image. I have been studying architecture for years now, or more precisely, overlapping aspects of the view from the building and the technique of image construction. Light finds its way into a darkened space even through what may be a chance opening, and an off-focus image of the exterior is projected upon the wall. You have your camera obscura. Which is why I think the camera obscura and architecture are closely related. Architecture divides real space into two, and thanks to the window, the interior and the exterior become images for one another. Consequently windows on a building not only demarcate interior and exterior space, but also facilitate observation and focusing. The photographic camera is in fact nothing but the portable model of one’s living room.

B.B.: What made you transfer your scenes to natural environments, to open space? Are you interested in the landscape, the vision of nature, for its own sake, or does it have a special meaning for you?

G.Ö.: I never really dealt with the landscape itself. What grabbed me was the bizarre contrast between the present, peaceful sight of the bunkers in the Atlantic Wall, on the one hand, and their historically determined position and the circumstances under which I make the picture, on the other. What mattered, in other words, was not the land but the fact of looking out. In the camera obscura projects there is always a natural correspondence between the site of the building and its interior.

B.B.: How did you chance upon the Atlantic Wall as a subject? To what extent were you influenced by the artistic and theoretical context that Virilio built around this complex phenomenon from the sixties on?

G.Ö.: Since I live in Amsterdam, the sea and the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall are always in sight. I have always considered them scary and bizarre. If only for a short time, these strange buildings represented Europe’s face towards the sea. I had heard about Virilio’s book earlier. He was the first to apply a theoretical perspective to bunker building. I wanted to follow up his ideas in my own way. I made a correspondence, for instance, between the speed of the war and the speed of the picture. Since I used extremely long exposure times in the camera obscura projects, often as long as seven or eight hours, the speed became identical, as it were, with slowness, the conditions dictated by the technology. However, I concentrated on the buildings and the potential that derives from their function, rather than the historic background. When I first climbed into one of these observation posts, I was almost blinded by the light pouring in through the thin opening. Standing there in the darkness I had the feeling I was standing inside a giant camera. It was almost necessary that the camera obscura should offer itself as the method of exploiting the building as a camera. The war called for the continuous observation of the seashore, so the bunkers tried to be invisible, covertly scrutinizing the land. It is a piece of architecture that perfectly satisfies the needs of the given form of observation.

B.B.: How and on what principles did you choose the scenes where you set up your camera obscura? What are the steps of creating a picture, and what practical problems do you have to overcome?

G.Ö.: I always choose locations that have something to do with the relationship of architecture and view, where the view is, one way or another, an integral part of the building. Like the building of the Prora on the isle of Rügen, on the northernmost tip of Germany. Even in its unfinished state, it is the longest building in Europe. It is as long as that because all rooms overlook the sea. Which is to say, it was the prospect that determined the structure of the building. I have also used a caravan, which can be considered a common multiple of the mobile home and the pocket camera. Or I used the sleeping car of a train as a camera. The project Constructed View was made in a high-rise under construction. Thanks to the technology, there were holes in the concrete cast, which enabled the use of the camera obscura technique. The image of the environment, projected into the building, comes into being as the building grows, and while the building become part of its own environment, it creates a new panorama in its own interior. Each project is a different challenge, and demands new solutions. I study the locations carefully. I have established a work method, with which it often takes years to reach the desired effect. The circumstances of creation become as inevitable a part of the picture as any error or fault. I never cut off the edges, and never intervene in any way in the creation process. I do not compose or arrange. It is the building or the location that determines the resulting picture. Since the photographic paper is exposed on location, I have done away with all intermediary stages of the process. Photography is a multiplication process, but in this case individual pieces are created, which become – as if in a strange performance without audience – iconic signs of the real view of the location.