Federico Luger (FL GALLERY) is pleased to present the second solo show in Italy by the hungarian artist Attila Szűcs “Portraits from the beginning of the XXI century”.

After his successful exhibition in the gallery and his personal exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest in 2016, Attila is coming back to Milan with a selection of new paintings: portraits of strangers from the beginning of the XXI century.

The exhibition is a complex dialogue between the series of small singles portraits distributed on the wall of the gallery and a big painting of a beautiful women with a cat. This “mirror” creates a reflection on human conditions and our destiny.

With his new paintings, Attila Szűcs seems to be asking a kantian question: what is man? where is he going to? Szűcs of course is not a prophet, he does not create an utopia, but tries to find different answers to some fundamental questions.

He now concentrates on portraits, faces of woman, man and children from different cultures. The base of images, as in the past, comes from mass media or old photographs, however, taken from their original environments, put in a void, in a universal drift. His faces and figures flow through cold and brittle lights, pointed with a single glow to underline a particular trait, a unique attribute. The richness of these images, the recurring applications of a single color has always been his trade marks, as he is yet attempting to show us what is behind an expression, how he sees today’s human.

Since the early 90’s he has been making traditional oil on canvas paintings. As a starting point, he often uses media images, newspaper cut-outs, postcards, film-stills. While painting, he concentrates on such high density moments, when our everyday experiences and viewing practices become obsolete while decoding. He creates empty spaces around the objects of thoughts and figures without defining them in a preconceived notion.

Attila Szűcs was born in Miskolc, Hungary and currently lives and works in Budapest. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands). His works are also held in permanent collections such as Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz (Austria), Hungarian National Gallery, Ludwig Museum in Budapest.