We Were Heroes – Slovakia, 2011
digital print
70 x 49 cm
We Were Heroes – Poland, 2011
digital print
70 x 49 cm
We Were Heroes – Hungary, 2011
digital print
70 x 49 cm
The works We Were Heroes (Slovakia, Poland, Hungary) are part of the Millennium Paintings Series of digital works, which Szombathy started in 2000. The artist collaged discarded communist objects, such as party booklets, membership cards of various organizations and stamps. He took over the pages from the membership booklets without intervention, but intervened in each composition by drawing a cross, as a symbol of suffering of the victims of the previous system. For Szombathy Bálint, art manifests itself as a personal archive – where various ideals, images, memories, knowledge, restrictions or taboos are placed. Due to such procedure, the works We Were Heroes (Slovakia, Poland, Hungary) are perceived as disturbing elements of the new transitional realities of ex-socialist peoples.
In We Were Heroes (Slovakia, Poland, Hungary) Szombathy Bálint, with complex relationships (art-culture-society-politics-ideology) thematizes today’s search of the Eastern European man (being in the gap between the post-socialism legacy and uncritically accepted /disguised/ reprisals of post-capitalism) for new and different identities. Szombathy collected and bought party booklets, membership cards and stamps in the underground passages upon his arrival in Hungary, where he noticed the incredible desire of people to give up material memories from the time of communism. The artist was especially interested in stamps, in whose strong graphic potential he found a kinship with the pop art iconography. Szombathy’s works are characterized by the presence of a dose of nostalgia – in recent decades more and more present among ex-Yugoslav peoples who, pressed by slow acclimatization to the market rules of (liberal) capitalism, have become aware of the advantages of Yugoslav multiculturalism as their own small-scale European Union.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-4/12.1.2015.
Inventory No: 83, 84, 85
Photo: Milan Kralj
Selected Bibliography:
Balint Sombati, Bili smo heroji, Sept. – Dec. 2014, exhibition catalogue, Likovni susret Modern Gallery, Subotica, 2014
Guided tour of the exhibition We Were Heroes, SEEcult.org, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhQ0BepPP7E, accessed on Mar. 27, 2020
Balint Sombati, Bili smo heroji, Sept. – Dec. 2014, exhibition blog, http://bilismoheroji-likovnisusret.blogspot.com/, accessed on Mar. 27, 2020
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bálint Szombathy (1950, Pačir, Serbia-2024) was a multimedia artist, writer and editor; one of the founders and members of the Bosch+Bosch Group (Subotica, 1969–1976) and one of the pioneers of the new Yugoslav art practice. He is a representative of nomadic and hybrid art practice in the eras of late socialist modernism, socialist and post-socialist postmodernism and current multicultural and transitional globalism. His work is not directed towards the production of an art object, he creates new or affirms insufficiently known linguistic forms of visual art. He has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at numerous international and domestic exhibitions, his works are part of significant institutional collections such as – Tate, London; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, etc.