Acb Gallery showcases a selection of the newest paintings cycle of Hungarian artist Róbert Batykó (1981) which he created during a residency program in Haarlem in the autumn of 2023.
Batykó has oscillated his painting program between abstraction and figuration in the past 20 years, his newest works are the latest step in his career-long hybrid process. The new paintings continue the increasingly playfull figurativeness of Batykó’s works and these articulate a new shift after half-a- decade long digital inspirations. The artist already turned back to analogue, tangible materials and motifs in his works on paper, which already required a different compositional approach than the specially scraped paintings before. Thus the exhibited paintings mark the beginning of a new painterly logic and method of Batykó. The new works also reflect on the hypnotic visual power of consumer culture, which is the other main driving force behind the general aspect of Batykó’s art. The new pieces also reconnect to earlier series, and can be associated with Róbert Batykó’s 2015–2016 series of packaging materials and in some aspect recall the artist’s earlier paintings thematizing trash (2010-2014), which he painted during his earlier stays in Holland.