The Russian Academy Of Arts

Tsereteli Art Gallery
19 Prechistenka street, Moscow

Tsereteli Art Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Pal Sarkozy and Werner Hornung organized by the Russian Academy of Arts under the auspices of Michael Shvydkoi, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for Cultural Cooperation, the French Embassy in the Russian Federation and Abigail Gallery and Auction House.

This is the first retrospective show of the artists in Moscow. For the recent years exhibitions of their artworks produced by computer and defined as Digital Fine Art have been arranged in many cultural capitals of the world from Amsterdam to Madrid.

The name of Pal Sarkosy de Nagy-Bocsa sounds familiar in the world press as the father of the President of France Nicolas Sarkozy. The world favored computer designer Werner Hornung is a winner of numerous prizes for digital art. The friend artists active in Paris for decades decided to surpass their own limits by expanding the process of picture creation by the use of the most up-to-date technology. Sarkozy’s traditional graphic approach and Hornung’s grounding in computer design have created their new, individual style.

Pal Sarkozy was born in 1928 in Budapest. He has lived in France since 1948 where he arrived as an “empty pocket immigrant”. After his marriage at the age of 21 (he married Andree Mallah, the mother of the French President) he looked for a job connected with art, thus he became an employee of a film studio and later an advertisement designer of Singer sawing machines. At 27 he opened his own advertisement studio in Paris which became a flourishing venture. He worked with the most famous brands and fashion companies of the world, Dior and L’Oreal.

Hornung was born in 1948 in South Germany. He was to be a journalist and he learnt graphics at a Swiss advertisement company. He moved to Paris in the 1970s where he also established an advertisement studio. He has always attempted to avoid giving up his own artistic world and found his way in the 1990s when he chose computer as his artistic medium. He was charmed by the new technology so much, that he spent all his time with computer added picture creation. The common work with Sarkozy, the feedback to drawing tradition has lifted him new horizons. Pal Sarcozy’s fantasy drawings serve as nucleus to the common digital pictures, which are accompanied by Hornung, who has always been fond of experimenting with technical novelties – with photo and computer manipulations.

Sarkozy’s and Hornung’s artworks defined as “digital fine art” transfer the traditions of Dada, surrealism and French symbolism into the most up-to-date techniques. The irony and fantasy mix up with antique myths and symbols of modern mass culture. The artists integrate in their art the “levity” and “weightlessness” of ads, TV shows, even street art together with the series of elements bound to the mannered and medialised conscious metropolis dwellers.

The pictures created by Sarkozy and Hornung can be considered as a metaphor, as a reference to the giant information and image flood penetrating our everyday lives. The pictures are not photos of a surrealistic-symbolic realm providing exiting view, but they as authentic age documents report about the liberating power of modern communication technology, the desire to trespass the limits, the rebuilding of the subject, the aesthetics of dissolution and substitution, and of course about the connection between the technique and nature, which is one of the most obvious facts of today’s culture.  

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