In the spring of 2016, a Hungarian daily reported on the collection presented at Imre Bukta's exhibition at Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna as follows: the show "features Imre Bukta's drawings, paintings, action photographs, objects, installation and performance documentations, as well as films.” This very list testifies to the extraordinarily diverse artistic activity and the complex oeuvre Bukta has built, in which both traditional and new art forms appear. Alongside traditional techniques and materials, the most recent media and new modes of expression also play a significant role. Imre Bukta – whose practice spans painting, graphics, sculpture, performance, action art, and installation – is regarded as the "agricultural artist” of "rural Hungary”, creating works with a unique perspective and a peculiar radiance that are unparalleled even in an international context. His art reflects the phenomena of the peasant mode of existence and culture that, despite many transformations, still survives. What interests Bukta is not folklore or the evocation or reinterpretation of folk art, but reality itself: the rural environment, the people living in close connection with nature, engaged in crop cultivation and animal husbandry, performing physical labour, and working with both traditional tools and modern machinery. Since the second half of the 1970s, his art – breaking with the refined sensibility and elegant taste of high art while conveying an original vision – has displayed a distinctive and highly diverse use of materials and techniques. In addition to traditional works such as oil-on-canvas paintings and ink-on-paper drawings, he most often creates mixed-media compositions that incorporate both living and inert materials, found objects elevated into artworks, and elements drawn from nature, as well as installations in which photography and video frequently play a role.
Alongside conventional art forms such as painting and sculpture, a significant role in Imre Bukta's oeuvre is played by site-specific and provisional works whose lifespan and mode of existence are limited: spatial arrangements, installations, as well as actions and performances carried out with recurring objects and props of his art. In a 2013 interview with Péter Sinkovits, art historian and editor-in-chief of Új Művészet (New Art) magazine, Bukta reflected on this as follows: „I have a certain reservation when it comes to found objects. I use and incorporate relatively few found objects in my works. Of course, there have been and still are examples, but this approach was more characteristic of Géza Samu. I tend to use materials rather than objects. For example, crops, seeds, hay. Materials, in other words, that appear in agriculture or in peasant, agrarian culture – but they are not objects. I want to emphasize this, because many people equate peasant material culture with folk culture. In my case, it is not about simply incorporating motifs or objects from folk culture.”
The almost exclusive subject of the artist's paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations is the landscape – viewed up close or from a slightly more distant perspective – either cultivated, conquered or still wild but bearing the mark of human intervention in some way, and the world of machines and tools closely associated. The recurring figures in his works are the characteristic people who inhabit this environment. After a long creative period in Szentendre, the artist now works again in his native village of Mezőszemere. His compositions – like those of many contemporaries who arrived on the quieter currents of Hungarian art after the waves of the neo-avant-garde – cannot easily be systematized or classified. Painting, graphics, sculpture, installation, action, and performance intersect and overlap in his work, emerging in forms that break away from their conventional embodiments and take on ever new shapes. In a spirit that celebrates free expression while establishing its own autonomous rules, fresh splashes of paint appear on his graphic works, graphic sheets become important parts of paintings, and bas-reliefs may emerge even from worn briefcases, matchsticks, or cornstalks and kernels. Bukta's emblematic 1970s composition titled Műanyagból tiszta búzát gyártó cséplőgép (The Thresher Producing Pure Wheat from Plastic) (1975) can even be considered as a traditional small sculpture, whose elements are wood, metal, plastic, and wheat. On one side, this mysterious little wooden structure swallows plastic granules contained in small transparent bags, while on the other side, pure wheat kernels appear from the machine's "stomach”. A pocketable miniature monument, the Zsebkaszakészlet (Pocket Scythe Set) (1980) can be carried by its owner, while finely crafted poaching tools and weapons – or even rubber boots – can transform into exhibition objects.
In his painting and graphic work Bezosztája-1 (Bezostaya-1) (1985), eleven half-length figures appear in a dense grove of notches, with – according to the subtitle – the academician Lukyanyenko himself in the lead, wearing a red jacket (the inscription reads: „People in the wheat field. Scenes from the life of Hungarian agriculture. [Academician Lukyanyenko is the breeder of the Bezostaya-1 wheat variety.]”). In the composition's upper left-hand space, a colourful patch of wheatears contrasts with the scientist's coat, and in addition to the convincing appearance of the figures – one of whom is feverishly filming this moment of historical significance that will never return – the rhythmic undulation of the notches creating the illusion of infinity proclaims that the breeding has been a success. The enigmatic, mysterious composition Gyöngytyúkot etető férfi (Man Feeding a Guinea Fowl), created in 1986, depicts a guinea fowl placed atop a tetrahedral peak, drawn into the circular motifs formed by thousands of tiny metal balls arranged on a large metal tray. In front of the guinea fowl stands a three-legged table, upon which rises a trap-like construction made of wooden and metal elements, from which an arm-like formation arches toward the bird. The entire arrangement serves as a spatial representation and foreshadowing of events imbued with ominous undertones and an uncertain outcome. In his later works, small sleds dart around the magical triangle formed by a wall-mounted kitchen cabinet crawling up to the high ceiling, a stove, and a perforated table – these little sleds later reappear, connected to the bacon slabs of a refrigerator – the garden trees don neckties to mark the festive day, and in the oil paintings evoking pub interiors, the flow of time comes to a standstill for endlessly long moments. As even the evocation of just a few of these works indicates, Imre Bukta”s art has borne the hallmarks of surreal vision from the very beginning, confronting us in startling ways with the absurdities of the world around us, while his always incisive questioning and sensitivity to problems guide the viewer into the realm of conceptualism. Gerda Széplaky, aesthete, stated in the catalogue of the 2012 Bukta exhibition entitled Másik Magyarország (Another Hungary) in the Kunsthalle:
‘In the oeuvre, alongside the machine objects, there appeared installations that now display the represented "erroneous” thought pattern as a narrative, i.e. they do not only present a single object, but a whole – absurd or even surreal – situation arranged in a complex visual composition. These installations already bear all the hallmarks of Bukta”s form-building. In addition to the transformed tools, machines and ready-mades, the works include formal elements, some taken directly from the material world, which have not undergone any transformation: they „represent” themselves in their own actual presence... Others, in contrast, are elements of poetic thought with symbolic force: motifs – painted, drawn or sculpted – that substitute for the represented reality as a reference, entering the realm of art precisely through their absence and their necessary transmutation into something new. The presentation of this diversity has resulted in appliqué-style artistic compositions, which, in the panel paintings created over the past decade and a half, have reached such fully developed formal realizations that they make Bukta's art unique and rank it among the highest achievements of Hungarian visual art.”
As with the sculptural objects, the graphic works and paintings are characterised by a combination of delicacy and superficial, rough-and-ready workmanship: meticulously rendered details are juxtaposed with blurred or smeared motifs, and masterfully captured figures and animals are altered through deliberate distortions and unexpected blurring. The artist often employs motif repetition – much like on rural wallpapers: pheasants, wild boars, haystacks, bushes, and trees line up across the pictorial surface in a playful, rhythmic order. His works are imbued with the mood of slow unfolding, the atmosphere of prolonged states, and the timelessness of frozen moments – the eternal constancy of everything unchanged. As recognized by Szilárd Borbély, a writer of tragic fate who, like Imre Bukta, made his way into Hungarian literature from a rural, earthbound environment:
"Patience was always present in Imre Bukta's works, a patience that took material form. The tiny lines, the matchsticks, gestures of miniaturization, and the humble, devoted elaboration of repetition.
The monotony of work, the monotony of life, the monotony of creation. Wisdom is in the understanding that represents the passing world with serenity. It sees in destruction not loss but the creation of a new world yet to come. The order of things lies in both destruction and birth. Instead of abstract and speculative signs and meanings, there is survival and serenity. The need for understanding in the face of an impatient, to put it in harsher terms, intolerant world.”
[2016]