The monograph on the photographic oeuvre of András Balla, published in autumn 2011, analyses in detail the artist’s four-decade-long work. This interpretation, by highlighting different, seemingly unrelated groups of images, paints a portrait of one of the most versatile and original artists in Hungarian photography. András Balla’s series on Baroque gardens, which unfolds mysterious beauties and mysteries, is not only known to those well-versed in photography but also to the 20th century. The series of concrete butterfly groups that wittily reflect the Hungarian public system of the 20th century, the haunting Imre Borostyán hermit-etude, the conceptual shots that astound with their riddles, and the fantastically sensitive compositions from his grandfather’s cassettes—the work of this artist is widely known at home and abroad. In addition to the particular choice of subject matter, the wit, thoughtfulness, and formal ingenuity of his works, we can register a wide variety of works that employ brilliant technical processes and creative solutions. It is very difficult to systematise his work, which is also considerable in terms of its number, spanning four decades: his art is characterised by a wide range of themes, varied genres, and a multifaceted application of techniques. Art writer László Hemrik wrote about the artist in a small monograph published in 2011:
“Balla’s pictorial world is composed of interconnected and coherent series, but also of many autonomous, unclassifiable images, pictorial experiments, which represent both material culture and the places, spaces, and exteriors surrounding man, by asserting newer and newer emphases, newer and newer observational aspects. It is probably thanks to the habitus of the garden designer that he moves from one genre to another, from one thematic block to another, in the most ‘natural’ way. László Fábián has rightly described Balla’s artistic ambitions, the thematic diversity of his art, as eclectic (Balla embraces this eclecticism), yet indulgent with this characteristic and very powerful variety, this ‘style-perceiving’ ability.”
These series are perhaps the most important works of the oeuvre. The two most important series of the early period of his career in the seventies and eighties of the last century are Műtárgyfotók (Works of Art Photographs) and Fényképfelvételek Borostyán Imréről (Photographs of Imre Borostyán), the gradually growing material of which was presented at numerous exhibitions and published in numerous catalogues and publications. In addition to their aesthetic significance, these series of images, which require several years, sometimes decades of creative work and are sometimes selected from thousands of shots, focus on very important features of Hungarian society and Central European reality in the last third of the 20th century, analyse its phenomena and formulate a powerful social critique. On the occasion of the 1980 exhibition of András Balla’s photographic work in the Helikon Gallery in Budapest, László Beke, art historian, said of the photographic work of this early period of his career, which was linked to these series. “András Balla’s profession is landscape designer and architect, his calling is photographer. As a photographer, he wandered for a long time, restless and skilful, from subject to subject, from one technical idea to another. His strong sociographic interest often led him to the peripheral phenomena of society—his most important series was of an old hermit living on a deserted mountain (which unwittingly contributed to the radical eradication of this undemanding but harmonious, contemplative way of life, since it was he who drew society’s attention to it). With his current exhibition, he seems to have moved even closer to the frontier he is best qualified to cultivate, since he is exploring a genre that is both architecture and garden art, an excellent sociographic subject, and which reveals its true nature not on the spot but through the masses of colour photographic documentation it has accumulated. Kitsch art has already attracted the attention of various artistic and intellectual circles—in relation to surrealism, naïve art, and then pop art—and its production and consumption remain practices alive today. Balla approaches the subject with a fresh eye: he avoids condemnatory good taste, caustic irony, or decadent indulgence, and instead tries to see the products of Sunday DIY as clearly beautiful, to appreciate them as artistic achievements, to select the most prestigious of them, to enter into the psyche of their creators. I feel that András Balla has succeeded in his endeavour: he has managed to get close to the deepest layer of kitsch, from which ‘real’ art is born. And I hope that these beautiful objects intended for private art will not suffer the same fate as Imre Borostyán’s ‘hermit’ cabin—simply because András Balla photographed them and society has mercy on them.”
He was interested in beauty, in the evocation of exceptional aesthetic values, and, of course, he was also guided by his original vocation, the desire to sum up the professional lessons of garden design and construction in the creation of a series of garden art interpreted through a series of colour images. During his fellowship in Paris in 1985 and in Rome in 1988, he established a series of colour photographs of the most significant monuments of European and then Hungarian garden art, the set of which he exhibited in several exhibitions (one of the most significant was the 1989 show at the Vigadó Gallery in Budapest). In his biography, he stresses that, in addition to experimental and experimental photographs, his work has paid particular attention to artistic documentation of garden art—perhaps most notably Versailles in 1985 and Rome, Frascati, Tivoli, Bomarzo, Bagnaia and Amalfi in 1988—and that he is particularly attracted by the garden atmosphere in rainy, overcast weather.
In addition to the series works, András Balla’s studio has produced and continues to produce thematic units that can be classified as still photographs, nudes, still lifes, boxes, or the nature photographs of the last period, which are summarised under the title of Menedék (Refuge). In the posed photographs and nudes, the human figure and naked body appear among strange objects and props—these strange objects and object ensembles also play a leading role in the compositions of the still lifes, which, as stage-like scenes and still lifes, are removed from the everyday world and saturated with transcendental content. With his depiction of a flat film cassette (Síkfilmkazetták 1–7 [Flat Film Cassettes 1–7], 1994–2010), which evokes the golden age of photography and reflects an unheard-of sensitivity and visual subtlety, András Balla interrogates the object’s magical meaning, content, and beauty. And in the making of his natural ensemble of black-and-white photographic images, Menedék (Refuge), published in 2013 as an album full of painterly expressions and reflected in a baroque swirl of lights and shadows, he returned to the landscape of the Kőrös rivers, the countryside of his childhood. In his reflections on the pictures in the book, the artist confessed with poetic inspiration, recording several important autobiographical moments: “I grew up in Szarvas, in the Arboretum, among the ten-metre-high bamboo groves along the Holt-Kőrös, among hundred-year-old mammoth pines, red, white and swamp oaks, cypresses, Ginkgo trees, tulip trees and thousands of plants. In this scenic garden, surrounded by a dense, wide protective forest belt, countless rare plants, animals, birds and insect species have found a home and a safe haven. I saw peacocks, buzzards, eagles, owls, blue and red sparrows, black storks, swallows, finches and sparrows on a daily basis. Birdwatchers, writers, and artists inhabited the guest room. Albert Vertse, Vera Csapody, György Ruzicskay and his bio-paintings, István Fekete with his faithful demijohn with basket, and many other precious people were part of my adolescence, and the love of nature was in everyone’s heart. This world, together with the miracle of seeing the sun rise and set in the sky several times at the same time as the full moon, seemed perfect. Little did I know then that I was living in an exceptional place and in an exceptional situation. Over time, all the doubts crystallised into questions to be answered. Is it possible for things to happen by chance? How is it that the same seeds always grow into the same plant, and how is it that two seeds of similar size and shape can grow into an arrow-sized pea or a giant tree a hundred metres tall? Having learned the secret of the messages encoded in the seeds, my instinctive fascination with trees has been matched by a conscious admiration and respect. I sensed and understood what ‘indigenous people’ had always known. I wish to memorialise the trees. With nothing more than their own torsos, imposing in their movements, gestures, without their foliage or life. As Josef Sudek said, it is neither right nor worthwhile to look for and find in these sculptures and statues the forms of other living beings—let us see in them the tree, the eternal tree. Although I have often photographed these trees in their surroundings, this panoramic form is the most suitable for my purpose, to see as much as possible where and among ‘whom’ the tree lives and lived. I looked for these trees in landscapes that could have looked like this a thousand years ago and perhaps could remain like this for decades to come. Perhaps it is up to us to recall, not only in protected areas, reserves and built gardens, what this essential and indispensable REFUGE for body and soul WAS like. P.S. Nothing in nature happens by chance. The shapes of the trees, branches, trunks, and twigs, and their relationships and interrelationships in the pictures, are not a matter of chance. They have been shaped this way and that way by the laws at work everywhere on Earth and in the Universe. The physical, chemical, biological, biochemical, meteorological, and static laws that were in force before the appearance of man and will continue to be in force after his disappearance (departure?) from the Earth.”
András Balla is a craftsman, an advocate, and a creator of analogue photography and image-making, but he does not engage with the modern achievement of digital image capture. Since the 1990s, he has worked only with large-format negatives, colouring his shots afterwards. His works are inspired by the spirit of the modern age, born under the spell of the serious conflicts and human problems of the time, confronting the absurdities of the world, expressing humanistic messages, striving for modernity, and progressive in their approach, and are made convincing and authentic by the use of traditional methods and means of image-making.
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