Relations and Reality. Avant-Garde Artists and Applied Arts beyond the 3Ts, in: Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary, Isotta Poggi and Cristina Cuevas-Wolf eds., Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2018, 57–70. (original) (raw)

In the early 1970s, the Hungarian artist Gábor Attalai created a series of photograms titled Relations and Reality. These works, found today in the Harald Szeemann archive at the Getty Research Institute, depict everyday objects: a flower, a lightbulb, a triangle drafting tool, and a milk package. The series clearly refers to László Moholy-Nagy and the traditions of modernism, but it is also linked to the contemporary trends of conceptual art. Attalai confronts real objects with their imaginary imprints and negative contours and thus investigates the artistic questions of representation in the spirit of Joseph Kosuth.