Jan 10th – Jan 24th 2025
Works available to buy from £120
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com
“Fantastic Plastic is kind of skit – a magnified presentation of errors; a slightly distorted presentation of reality designed to amplify and expose those errors. It’s like a curved mirror which makes fun of how innovative and stupid human beings can be in a very short time period. It’s a slice of this time period, mixed with memories, and impulsive emotions. The figures are also my story tellers. These animals and creatures are the puppets who transform my voice into this weird language.“
Imre Sofalvi is a Hungarian artist living in Pécs, Hungary, where he studied art at the University of Janus Pannonius. Drawing is his primary medium, leading him to create paintings and unique collages that tell stories. His creatures are not just creations but his closest friends and companions through which he narrates stories and engages in dialogues, sharing his secrets. Imre has a deep appreciation for textures and is constantly in pursuit of achieving the ‘great balance’.
Imaginative and playful, Imre’s work supplements the familiar image of the classroom illustration with the fantastical in this unique collection of oversized and wildly colourful risograph, serigraph, and mixed media works embracing the bizarre.
Read our interview with Imre on our blog, here.
Immersing in Zoologism by Dr Attila Szabó DLA, fine artist and associate professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts
The doctor, overlooking his surroundings, examined his latest creation. Leaning in close, he held his glasses with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, fearing they might slip off his nose as his skin was sweaty from the heat and the excitement. In his right hand, a long and thin stainless steel tool poked the peculiar living being lying on the surgical table, illuminated by strong light. At that moment, no one could predict what would happen next.
According to Jean Baudrillard, the individual’s consumer demands and the satisfaction of their needs are far from being in harmony under the control of the consumerism of social existence. This leads to the dissolution of familiar functions, with the next step being transmutation. It is not uncommon for nature or the machine itself to also create oddities, such as misshapen injections, misfit components, two-head snakes, five-legged pigs – these are not metaphors but manufacturing anomalies, or in some cases, biological distortions, evidence that the creator sometimes makes mistakes as well. For even compositional processes have their own rules, requirements that presuppose systematic design, necessary expertise, and perhaps artistic demand.
In 1954, a russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, in a secret Moscow laboratory, surgically attached the front limbs and head of a young, small dog to the neck of an adult, large-sized dog, thereby creating a half dog from a whole. With this experiment, he attempted to prove that a brain could function in a foreign body. The experiment was repeated nineteen times over the next fifteen years, with the longest-living composite dog surviving for a month. In its stuffed state, it is displayed at the Moscow Museum of Natural Science. Hybrid creatures are not primarily approached from a scientific perspective; the rich mythologies of various cultures presents numerous beings, known and lesser known, from the Minotaur to Ganesh. Borges Book of Imaginary Beings even catalogues most of these. Various degrees of hybridity can be observed in terms of human and animal ‘components’, resulting in human-human hybrids where heads (Janus) or limbs (Shiva) are duplicated or multiplied. In other cases, human and animal body parts are assembled, sometimes a human head and an animal body (lamassu), or vice versa (Minotaur), but perhaps the most fantastic solutions come from the mixing of animal details with another animal’s body (Chimera). These beings are not only favoured by writers or filmmakers but also by visual artists, appearing frequently in artworks from ancient times to the contemporary era, from Greek vase paintings to Uffe Issolotto, Shen Shaomin, Tessa Farmer, Jan Farbe, to Géza Szőllősi’s chitinous superhero series. It is less common to find examples where living beings are combined with inanimate objects by artists, but when we think of Hieronymus Bosch’s incredibly imaginative figures, such occurrences come to mind. As strange as it may seem, there are even artistic precedents for the melding of plant and human elements, not referring to the terribly pathetic mushroom-zombies from The Last of Us, but to a Brazilian artist developing transgenic art, Eduardo Kac, and his project titled Natural History of the Enigma.
What makes all this bizarre? Perhaps the fact that by playing God, we can crossbreed anything with anything else, eagerly anticipating the outcome, which, even if we are pleased with, does not provide lasting excitement, and nothing holds us back from further playthings because we can produce a meat hybrid from a domestic chicken (Gallus Domesticus) that reaches slaughter weight in barely six to eight weeks from the egg. The post-human horizon provides adequate protection to override ethical considerations with curiosity, the ability to immediately manufacture ideology to appease both our own and others’ consciences. Science is a good excuse, of course, made in the service of a loftier goal, but so is art. After all, who or what couldn’t become an object of art? Lets say – a clothespin?
However, as long as this is happening on paper, using graphic and printing methods, one only needs to meet artistic criteria and consideration.This is not insignificant, fortunately, and as long as the layers of complex interpretation of the toolkit and the compositional sign system inquire about or point out the embarrassing features of our society, paving the way for countless opportunities for discourse, then it is perfectly appropriate if the head of a rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes Nasicornis) gets stuck in the pencil sharpener.
Beside the white-coated assistant, the doctor begins to dictate: the cauliflower-headed hoofed animal (Botrytis Caput Capreolus), shows increasingly promising life functions; its circulation can be deemed stable and the intubation can be discontinued. Its respiration mostly occurs through the lungs, partly aided by gas exchange pores. The symbiosis appears functional, photosynthesis has started, and self-nourishing possibilities have arisen. The release of the experimental specimen will be possible following the monitoring phase.
Find out more about Imre’s work on his Instagram or website. ‘Fantastic Plastic’ is at Six Foot Gallery from the 10th to the 24th January.