Art Encounters 2017 Exhibitions:
Home, Sweet Home

Sándor Bartha (b. 1962) lives in Budapest and is a lecturer at the Visual Arts Department of the Partium University from Oradea/Nagyvárad (Romania). His artistic practice refers to private, family situations, and the background of this universe accompanies other topics coming from the public political sphere, seen with a critical and ironic eye by the artist.

Selected exhibitions: More Than Syntax, At Home gallery, Samorin (2015, solo); Devices for a Better World, Art Museum, Arad (2015, solo); R.A.M. – Random Acces Memory, Art Museum, Arad (2014); 20 Years: KulturKontakt Austria – Mail Art project + exhibition at ViennaFair (2012); When History Comes Knocking: Romanian Art from the 80s and 90s in Close Up, Plan B Gallery Berlin (2010); On Difference #2, Stuttgart (2006); Pasaj, Ludwig Museum, Kis.terem, Budapest (2003, solo); Transferatu, IFA Bonn, IFA Berlin (2001-2000); Service, Műcsarnok Budapest (2001); Sarcophagus, Cultural Center of Hungary, Bucharest (1996). He participated in the Prague and the Venice Biennales (2003 and 2001, respectively).

With consistency, Sandor Bartha has built, over the years, a work of unfailing coherence. The artist, originally from Szekely Land but who now lives in Budapest, has become known and recognized for his installations and his sculptures tinkering from small Playmobil figurines, with props and trinkets that have revealed the political stakes and the implacable socialization to which we are all subject. Through the toys, prototypes of the world, Sandor Bartha replays stories that bring to the surface, conscious or unconscious things. One way of becoming the director of his own life story and change the scenario depending on circumstances. In March for a New Identity, a congregation of small plastic add-on, have been gathered in an improbable way, obviously, part of the universe of the toy. These found objects, scattered on the ground, as landed on an extraterrestrial body tell a science fiction tale at bedtime.

Images :

1. Bartha Sándor, Portrait

2. Bartha Sándor, March for a New Identity (2017), installation, 100 x 400 x 50 cm, photo credits: Bartha Sándor