Ferenc Gróf & Zsófia Gyenes: Magnificent Shades of Us | A Spectral Glossary

15/03 – 20/04/2025

Opening: 14/03/2025 7 pm

Opening remarks by: Enikő Róka, art historian

"If there is a period in history that is painted grey on a grey background, it is definitely ours.

People make their own history, even if it is through the media vacuum of touch screens, but never freely, according to their own choices, but directly following ready-made, inherited patterns and pre-given circumstances. The tradition of all the dead and shadow generations weighs like a nightmarish burden on the living, and just when it seems that they are working to transform themselves and the situation, to create something that has never existed before, it is precisely in such times of crisis that they summon the ghosts of the past to serve themselves, borrowing their names, their slogans, their costumes, to stage a new farce of world history in such archaic, venerable disguises and borrowed language.

The exhibition of new collaborative works by Ferenc Gróf and Zsófia Gyenes evokes some of the forgotten shadows of the recent past that still haunt us today: the ultra-left opposition of the former socialism, the official revolutionary museum of the same regime, the Hungarian Museum of the Labour Movement, whose foundations have now been dug up and destroyed by an obscure neo-neo-Renaissance sect, and an anarchist theoretical work published as samizdat. The exhibition is a kind of glossary, a collection of phonemes of a grammar in need of reconstruction. One is not born a ghost, but becomes one".

(Ferenc Gróf, Zsófia Gyenes)

Colour and textile designer Zsófia Gyenes and visual artist Ferenc Gróf started working together in 2022. After living in Paris for more than 20 years, they moved to Orléans, where they set up their workshop in October 2023. Their collective works are created on the border of textile design and visual art.
Zsófia Gyenes (1977, Budapest) is a textile designer and visual artist. She studied in Budapest and Paris and graduated from the Textile Department of ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 2004. After almost 20 years of working as a textile designer in the fashion, interior and automotive industries, she started her independent artistic practice in 2022.
As a founding member of the artist group Société Réaliste (2004-2014), Ferenc Gróf (1972, Pécs) created an artistic practice focusing on linguistic and typographical elements, statistics and cartographic signs to examine social processes and to highlight the connections between the past and the present. After the dissolution of Société Réaliste, his vision and approach remained, and his work deals with ideological imprints at the intersection of graphic design and spatiality. Since 2012, he has been a lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art (ENSA) in Bourges.

Supported by: Möbelkunst, NKA, Káli Kövek