29 April – 2 September 2015

Collegium Hungaricum Wien, Hollandstrasse 4, 1020 Wien

With the exhibition in Collegium Hungaricum Wien we are paying homage to Gábor Kerekes, a Hungarian photo artist who passed away last year, and whose body of work still needs to be discovered by a broader European public. At the PhotoMagic exhibition his work will be complemented with the selection of works of two other internationally renowned photo artists, Stane Jagodič (Slovenia) and Branko Lenart (Austria), whose approach to photography has been similarly explorative and experimental. These aspects of photography will be elaborated also in the complementary exhibition at Photon Gallery / AnkerBrot Fabrik, Wien.

Gábor Kerekes (1945–2014) is one of the most important Hungarian and European photographers, involved in art photography for over 30 years. Initially interested in technical aspects of photography, he gradually turned to a metaphorical representation of the relation between ‘Art and Science’. His technical processes range from the camera obscura, through historical photographic techniques to large-scale professional methods. Gábor Kerekes makes ontological and epistemological investigations; he probes the bounds of human cognition. He seeks our place in the universe by researching the characteristics of the human sensory organs – in particular those that help us find our bearings: the eye, the ear and the brain. Incorporating both “magical” and rational approach to photography, his work remains inspirational to younger generations of artists as well to many of art historians and experts in the field of visual arts theory.

Stane Jagodič (1943) has been active in various fields, media and contexts of visual art since the mid 1960s. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1970, he soon became one of the most active and important artists with his own recognizable expression in ex-Yugoslavia. In his always developing and continuous body of work he has adopted several different concepts of artistic production using various artistic media such as photography, painting, graphics, cartoons, performance, assemblages and object art (installations). Jagodič was co-founder and conceptual leader of Grupa Junij, active between 1970 and 1985, broad artistic platform that included number of prominent local and international artists.

Branko Lenart (1948) was born in Ptuj, Slovenia, but immigrated with his family in 1954 to Graz, Austria. From 1972 – 1978 he studied Pedagogy in Graz. In 1980s he continued to study photography around the world; from USA, France, England, Italy to Israel. He has been teaching photography at the College of Art and Design (1979 – 2007) and at the Technical College (1996 – 2003) in Graz. Branko Lenart was a co-founder of the avant-garde art society “Graz photo school”, a group of artists associated with the gallery Forum Stadtpark. In a series Hand:Work, presented at the Photomagic exhibition, Lenart preserved the basic Dadaist principle of juxtaposing visual and textual elements, with the text first functioning as a text complementary comment, and later becoming an integral part of each photograph.