Signs of the City and Telephotography

Bálint Szombathy, a conceptual artist born in Vojvodina in the former Yugoslavia (1950), is one of the key names of the former Yugoslav as well as Hungarian art. His practice included a wide range of artistic activities, from visual poetry, processual art, land art and performance, to conceptual art. Quite early on, he drew attention to his performative projects, such as The Trails (Subotica, 1970), or the photo performance Bauhaus (Novi Sad, 1971), while becoming particularly renowned for addressing the topic of socialist reality in projects such as Lenin in Budapest (1972), when after the end of the May Day celebrations, he provocatively carried Lenin’s portrait along the streets of the Hungarian capital. In 1969, he and Slavko Matković founded the Bosch + Bosch group, which represented a platform of neo-avant-garde artists from Vojvodina, Serbia, and Hungary. The group played a significant role in connecting with related movements and artists across Europe, particularly with its access to relevant information from the Western world. However, also within the group, Szombathy maintained the individual position of a “nomadic artist” who embodies the Beuys concept of “art as social sculpture”, that is, the end result of the artistic practice is the artist himself, who manifests and self-realises himself as his own work of art.

His latest series of photographs, entitled Signs of the City, which is presented at the Photon Gallery, draws from the aforementioned contexts of his work. The series was namely created as a result of contemplations of the artist’s environment in Budapest—the depicted motifs are trivial and he particularly documents “civilisational” interventions into the old city, such as the omnipresence of black cables extending over the facades of historic houses, or wires protruding from openings in the buildings, among other things. In a documentary way, the artist has been discovering inconsistencies in the urban structure and capturing various locations and their “signs”, thereby creating hundreds of images in the segment of the “topography of everyday life”. In this sense, Bálint Szombathy is not merely an important representative of neo-avant-garde and engaged art, but also a theoretician and protagonist of “semiotic art”, which also includes the works chosen by the artist from his archive, entitled Signs of the City.