The exhibition titled “American abstractions” – Pictures of a foreign study trip gave me the idea of presenting a Hungarian artist who is able to immerse Hungarian art in a foreign cultural environment and then enrich Hungarian art with elements of the culture there that are important for him. In the light of the artist’s work, our idea is to select a few characteristic works from his foreign periods and place the main emphasis on the results of his latest American study trip.
Csaba Szegedi sums up his present American activity: “I am studying space, the possibilities for representing space and its relations and conflicts with the image as a flat surface. Shaping real space and forms, colours and light into visual forms, rhythms and contrasts, the transmutation of space into visual composition is what excites me. This is a process where the higher the level reached in abstraction from reality, and the better it obeys the laws of visual reality, the more successful the picture is. The optimal state in the process of abstraction is reached in the course of successive reworkings. In doing this I try to make the painting process visible in a way that can be followed. I do drawings and generally paint large canvases of cityscapes. The cityscape is only a theme, just a “pretext” to create exciting compositions. For a long time I have wanted to paint New York skyscrapers, and the highways, turnpikes, overpasses and other “anti-painterly” themes.”

“In Hungary – because we are so small compared to the world – it is only worthwhile being an artist, and the painter should only create if he is able to create and preserve his individual character, the individuality of his works. The artist’s aim should not be to follow trends uncritically but to seek what is valuable and “original”. If a talented Hungarian creative artist stays abroad for a while, studies, gathers information as widely as he can on study trips, the result should be that he is able to follow his own individual course as an artist with even greater determination.” Pál Gerzson, painter (Munkácsy Prize-laureate, Artist of Merit)