Already with his first works, presented in the late 1960s, Péter Prutkay emerged as a creator with an original vision, a lonely path and an experimental spirit, who was moving away from traditional forms of artistic expression. The modern Hungarian art scene was just reviving after the socialist-realist ideological-cultural-political roller-coaster. In the 1970s and 1980s, he mainly produced prints (skilfully executed etchings, aquatints, lithographs, colour screenprints) that recalled the turning points in Hungarian history and sharply reflected on the social phenomena of the current regime. He produced also collages and photographic works, and in addition to these, he also regularly exhibited plastic compositions, concrete sculptures – objects –, found objects, found-object assemblages. His works were organised into thematic and symbolic cycles exploring labyrinths, eggs, nests, historical turning points – the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–49, the First and Second World Wars, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – and contemporary issues. Created as two-dimensional graphic works, reliefs and three-dimensional assemblages, these compositions reveal to the viewer the distinctive artistic identity of a creator who pursued a singular path within Hungarian art and contemporary graphic art (One of his earliest installations, exhibited at the Szürenon exhibition, fell victim to an act of destruction by the officials. The event is worthy to be noted in art history. The Csontváry Object Collage, presented at an exhibition held at the Kassák Club in Budapest, was dismantled on the orders of an official of the district council, accompanied by an official letter containing the threat: “Your actions may result in legal proceedings.”) The mere examination of the techniques and materials employed in Péter Prutkay's works reveals fascinating, distinctive characteristics and allows us to draw important conclusions. The artist has employed traditional printmaking techniques with the same ease and high level of craftsmanship as the latest photographic, printing and reproduction technologies. Beyond their technical and formal diversity, Prutkay's compositions are also characterised by dualities and complex layers of meaning in their subject matter, use of motifs and methods of symbolism. The old and the new, the relic and the mass-produced everyday object, the document and the autonomous artistic creation can meet and intermingle freely in his works. One of Prutkay's preferred methods for bringing together motifs and associations that move freely between different eras and contexts, objects and intellectual traditions, materials and techniques is collage, in which the constituent elements are assembled into compositions while retaining their tangible, material qualities.
Following the turn of the millennium, the stark contrast between the delicate execution of his graphic works and the brutality and cruelty of reality compelled the artist to change direction. Having witnessed at close quarters the ruthless display of state power and acts of police brutality in Budapest in the autumn of 2006, he concluded that he could no longer produce intricately detailed, finely executed graphic works imbued with an intimate atmosphere. It was from this point onwards that his work in box art came into its own, giving rise to a series of unusual object collages arranged within enclosed, stage-like spaces.
Péter Prutkay's extensive collection of box sculptures and reliefs, closely related to the work of several contemporary artists working in the same medium, can be regarded as an ensemble of art-historical significance. The box as an artistic form emphasises its status as a self-contained artistic space far more strongly than a framed picture. It constitutes an “inner” world that is enclosed to a certain degree, clearly separated from its surroundings, emphasising its autonomous mode of existence and allowing the viewer a kind of controlled glimpse inside.
What was once the picture plane now becomes an enclosing background, in front of which the action of the work unfolds across several planes or within a complex, compressed foreground. The box thus almost inevitably entails an interplay between flat surfaces, relief elements attached to those surfaces and three-dimensional components that can only notionally be viewed from all sides, bringing together the expressive means of painting and sculpture. Through the fusion of painting's illusionistic representation of space with painted sculptural and object elements, extraordinarily intense visual effects, rich in formal variety, can emerge.
More important than these formal qualities, however, are the modes of expression, the seemingly direct – or, more often, indirect – messages and metaphorical syntheses embodied in the works. Even those motifs of Prutkay which are apparently straightforward, are characterised by complex dualities. Through his exceptionally sensitive and inventive collage technique, the artist brings together different eras and environments, objects and intellectual traditions charged with meaning, materials and techniques. He questions what appears self-evident, strips away the aura of the sublime and sets in motion a fierce interplay between surface and essence, appearance and reality. Even the most understated of Prutkay's object collages is laden with multiple layers of conceptual meaning. Yet there is no formula: every work demands a fresh way of thinking visually and an approach to viewing art free from preconceived patterns.
Old props and new objects, relics and mass-produced everyday items, historical documents and elements of autonomous artistic creations can be ingeniously combined and fused, unfolding new layers of meaning that prompt unexpected insights within the enclosed yet open, stage-like space of each box. Alongside his early motifs and symbolically charged objects and elements of reality – nests, eggs and labyrinths – Péter Prutkay's compositions increasingly feature objects, consumer goods and media icons associated with the recent past and the present, as well as their caricatured or ironically reinterpreted versions.
One of the most plausible approaches to describing and interpreting this new body of work – which is divided into distinct groups, each centred on themes and ideas inspired by characteristic contemporary phenomena – is to regard it as the elevation of the everyday and the kitsch into art. Yet the situation and the phenomenon are considerably more complex than that. Although everything glitters and gleams, and everything is executed with dazzling virtuosity and meticulous attention to detail, the individual elements oscillate between the contrasting qualities of craftsmanship and high-tech, mass-produced design. Beneath their extraordinary beauty and fairy-tale veneer, however, lie profound tragedies, acute suffering and matters of life-determining consequence.
The objects appearing in Prutkay's compositions – and this, too, may cause some confusion – represent both themselves and are metaphors. Yet another contradiction: amid the dreamlike, surreal visions, theatrical apparitions and cascades of objects, order is often imposed by a sober, symmetrical, altar-like approach to composition.
The box artworks fashioned from childhood toys bear witness not only to childhood itself but also to the definitive end of an age of play, when the possibilities of playing have been exhausted. Object collages assembled from the wreckage of mobile phones are belated harbingers of the collapse that followed an astonishingly rapid explosion of technological civilisation – is there still any place in the world where a mobile phone has never rung in someone's pocket? The figures drawn from the repertoire of media kitsch – the gurus and the whores – embody our everyday experiences of the media, phenomena and personifications of virtual realms translated into tangible reality, where the question of depth arises almost incidentally, second by second. The sanctuaries of shopping malls and banks, adorned with hollow splendour, are the sets and props of a pseudo-reality that has replaced a former world of values, now reduced to appearances and lies.
The surreal vision – the telephone-bird, the microprocessor-animal, the printed-circuit-board altar, the machine-gun crown of thorns, the rear view of a skull revealing the mirror image of a wise owl – is a distillation of the sense of life and philosophy of life of an age in which anything seems possible, rendered deliberately and extraordinarily ambiguous through artistic means. It is in its sadness, yet invigorating in the insights it offers.
Péter Prutkay places the great periods and turning points of Hungarian history, together with the everyday phenomena of the present as they become history, at the centre of his art and his box works. Great historical heroes and the heroes of everyday life seek their place in this world, while the lessons from grand, world-changing ideas appear side by side with folk wisdom, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in confrontation.
And behind all this stands the thoughtful, wisely contemplative artist, who, as he observes the phenomena of the world, is troubled by profound doubts of the kind that Péter Prutkay, then primarily a graphic artist, expressed in the metaphorical conclusion to an interview conducted in the 1980s. The protagonist of the story is a bird – perhaps not by chance:
“When I was a child, I had a sparrow that had been born without legs. One day it escaped from me. I imagine it spent its entire life in the air – flying. Perhaps that is where it died, too.”
[2013]