The Ideal Room

Dénesh Ghyczy

We are pleased to present our solo exhibition with works by Dénesh Ghyczy.

The exhibition "The Ideal Space" marks Dénesh Ghyczy´s return to the timeless theme deeply embedded in the DNA of his oeuvre—the dialectic of inside and outside. Building on his earlier "Inside Outside" series, he transcends into a painterly exploration of a dynamic perception of space. In his latest works, iconic modern architectural sites, translated into the medium of painting, find themselves in precarious relationships. "Boardwalk," a central piece in the exhibition, portrays the open, modernist steel structure of a boardwalk set amidst nature, seemingly dissolving in the interplay of light and shadow, rendered with an intense color palette.

The artist pushes the process of working on the texture of his paintings even further in "System," a fragmentary depiction of the transparent glass body of Jean Nouvel's Fondation Cartier in Paris. While the fluid architecture of the museum harmonizes with nature, a pictorial competition unfolds on the canvas between vegetation and construction, chaos and order. Ghyczy's paintings serve as a testament to the porous and fluid nature of the relationship between inside and outside, challenging the illusionistic picture space and celebrating the materiality of the canvas.

"The Museum" deviates in several ways, presenting an alternative opening common in museum architecture: the skylight. The classical museum hall appears unusually closed, austere, and gray, with only a group of figures in a theatrical space. However, the action doesn't involve the figures but unfolds in the broad pink streaks hanging from the ceiling, floating in space, demasking the house literally as a ruin. The ideal nature of this space is questioned, hinting that its prime may be in the past, or one could inquire of the young people casually hanging out there.

In "Private Utopia," Ghyczy provides a glimpse of what an ideal private space might look like. The painting depicts a sunlit, stylish, and cozy living room where a young woman engrossed in her book sits on a sofa with raised legs. The recurring art-historical theme of the back figure suggests that these figures serve less as narrative elements and more as entry points for viewers. The real drama unfolds on a different level—the painterly representation of ephemeral phenomena like light and shadow, highlights and reflections, in undulating brushstrokes that spread like a hovering carpet of sound across the canvas.

Harmony and the shimmering atmosphere in Ghyczy's works seem owed to a perpetual dialectical balancing act—a continual exploration of the possibilities offered by the medium of painting and the relationships between inside and outside, architecture and nature, order and chaos, control and chance. The ideal space, it appears, is the fixation of a moment of stillness in this process of constant weighing and indulgence in the grand play of openings, circulations, interconnections, and penetrations.

Text: Alexandra Hennig, Art Historian