June 11, 2025 - July 12, 2025
Monochrome raster surfaces, gradient-coloured bars that cut across the composition or a swirling ensemble of illusionistically ascending or irregularly floating letters form the visual language of Bea KUSOVSZKY's latest series of paintings. The works presented in the exhibition Generational Code at VILTIN Gallery maybe the artist?s most personal and series to date: it mixes in a playfully synthesises the typographic world of her parents' generation of the 1990s with the visual language of her own abstract painting.
The first point of reference in Bea KUSOVSZKY's artistic practice was the early work of American Pop Art pioneers such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. After graduating in 2012, she created figurative works in which she neutralised life-sized, photorealistic figures using gestures and raster-dot structures reminiscent of Lichtenstein.
Removing the figures from her compositions, her attention later turned to non-narrative, self-refering gesture, geometric space division and the optical, Op Art-like play of moiré patterns coming from the system of raster dots.
After 2019, continuing her techniques of reduction and incorporating the post-digital abstract visual codes of the 21st century, her painting developed a distinctive, minimal style. The visual world of her perfectionist works reflects not only on the contemporary question of construction and deconstruction in an ontological sense, but also on the problem of the real and latent boundaries of pictorial language and on the role of the compositional frame. Her works explore the visual effect of image within the image, the abstract pictorial possibilities of illusion and trompe-l'oeil and the depiction of natural forms, like pseudo-crumpled surfaces in relation to the painting's geometric layers of structure.
As an artist who work in series, creating paintings that build upon and reflect on one another, KUSOVSZKY displays a distinctive use of colour with a spectrographic quality. Her starting point is the colour separation of natural light through a Newtonian prism, which she manipulates full or partly, sometimes introducing chromatic shifts. This is combined with contrasts of black and white as well as cool and warm greys. Her works after 2020 are connected to the visual thinking of artists such as Bridget Riley or significant figures of the Hungarian art scene, including Tamás Hencze, István Nádler and József Bullás, establishing her work as a cultural generational link.
Bea KUSOVSZKY grew up in the ink-scented atmosphere of a screen-printing workshop, surrounded by light-sensitive foils, films, cut-out letters, poster designs and book illustrations. Her parents ran a children?s book publishing house. Her father, a graphic designer and picture editor, introduced her early on to the boldly coloured world of screen printing and those letter stencils that defined 1990s typography. This influence first appeared in her Vitrin of the Image Error series, starting in 2024. The emblematic "crumpled paper" pseudo-image element characteristic of KUSOVSZKY's work fractured, giving way to painted surfaces inspired by digital noise and screen image errors, while floating letters began to appear in compositions conceived as spatial trompe-l'oei rendering the image simultaneously illusory and material.Her current series, Generational Code, builds upon this visual world. The originally paper-thin, flat letters continue to float in an indefinite abstract pictorial space, while the naturalistic image of crumpled paper serving as an ontological contrast gradually disappears. In its place emerges the silvery letter-balloon, the neo-pop icon of graffiti tags. With this shift, KUSOVSZKY relocates the techno-imagery of the 1990s into a striking 21st-century colour environment.
Bea KUSOVSZKY (1986, Budapest) graduated in 2012 from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts' department of painting and art education, studying under Orsolya Drozdik. Between 2010 and 2011, she also studied painting and animation at the Universitat de Valencia. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions in Hungary, her works have been exhibited in solo shows in Vienna, Frankfurt and Bratislava. Her works are in the collection of the Erste Stiftung (AT), the contemporary art collection of the Central Bank of Hungary, as well as in private collections in Hungary and abroad.