Attila Szucs

This richly illustrated volume surveys the oeuvre of Attila Szücs (born 1967), one of Hungary’s most important contemporary painters. Szücs works with old newspaper clippings, postcards, photographs and film stills, adding new meaning to the remnants of collective memory. Alongside themes and issues of memorialization and the artist’s early experiences with totalitarianism, incursions of the uncanny into the everyday frequently populate Szücs' large oil paintings: ghostly protagonists, strange furniture and ordinary objects stand isolated in deserted spaces, melancholic in their lack of relationship to anything else. Szücs' masterful use of light and shadow, in combination with unexpectedly harsh colors, reinforces the surrealistic impression of these scenes, which is intensified by the influence of Eastern and Central European painting upon his work. Dream and memory dissolve into each other, creating a fascinating state of suspension.