Máté Orr

2011/03/02-2011/03/26

Csendélet flamingóval / Still life with Flamingo, 140x100, akril vászon / acrylic on canvas 2010
Still Life with Flamingo100×140 cm | acrylic on canvas | 2010

“While winter is still lingering on outside, assaulting us with its harsh winds, why don’t we just withdraw a little and instead examine our inner landscape. Máté Orr’s paintings take us into a microcosm of closed interiors populate with favorite pets, familiar objects and enigmatic symbolism.

Máté’ s works build upon an old-master tradition and are born from the juxtaposition of unexpected components and an interchange of the particular and the ideal. While some elements are painted with photorealistic precision, they alternate with sharply contoured silhouettes.

His technique straddles the classical and the baroque, those two great tendencies in Western art: the drive to capture unique identity of object and urge to express a universalizing form.

The eye can only study one point of focus at a time, and when one seizes upon one of Máté’s cabbages, greyhounds, or hairless cats, all the rest recedes into pattern and abstraction. It is a highly profound and accurate description of how we see.”

Jeff Taylor Phd, art historian (text of the opening speech held at the exhibition opening)

Inspired by traditions of classical art, Máté Orr creates vibrant paintings and popular graphics that have elements of the grotesque and ironic in them, juxtaposing real and symbolic details. Orr was born in Veszprém in 1985 to a family of artists including a sculptor father, a painter mother and a graphic artist brother. For high school, Orr attended the Fine and Applied Arts Vocational School and graduated in 2005. He then continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts as a graphic art major who later switched his focus to painting and has been under the tutelage of Gábor Nagy since 2008.

Last year, Orr first exhibited in the Ari Kupsus Gallery during a showcase of works by the Academy of Fine Arts’ most promising fourth-year students. As a standout artist, he was invited to return for this solo debut in the gallery where he will exhibit a blend of oil on canvas paintings. These include some of his imaginative works featuring detailed human and animal subjects whose sharp features are contrasted with peculiar props and intricate backdrops.