Attila Konnyu: Innovation in Art - A Solo Exhibition in Shenzhen, China
Great Art Space – VA Gallery Hong Kong – Hungarian Cultural Institute
November 2019
About the Event
The solo exhibition Innovation in Art presents a comprehensive selection of works by Hungarian artist Attila Konnyu, whose practice traverses the boundary between abstract expressionism and contemporary digital media.
This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to examine the artist’s evolving engagement with material, space, and perception, all within the architectural context of a venue that itself echoes the themes of harmony and innovation that characterize his oeuvre.
Konnyu’s visual language is rooted in abstraction, yet it resists formal categorisation. His canvases - often created through performative methods involving pouring, erasing, and gestural mark-making - function as both meditative spaces and records of psychic and somatic experience.
The viewer is invited to consider not only what is depicted, but how each image operates as a temporal event: a residue of internal states projected onto the external world.
His approach aligns with the traditions of gestural abstraction and contemporary abstract painting, yet departs from them through a distinctly contemplative methodology. The result is a body of work that reflects not only the energy of the gesture, but the discipline of stillness and reflection.
Currently based in Palm Beach, Florida, Konnyu draws on the phenomenological qualities of his environment - the overwhelming light, heat, and atmospheric density of the subtropical climate.
These elements contribute to a perceptual condition in which sensory boundaries dissolve, a state of immersive presence that informs both his methodology and the conceptual foundations of his work.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Konnyu integrates influences from installation art, meditation, and performance, producing work that is experiential as much as visual.
This dissolution of the self into nature becomes, in Konnyu’s practice, a source of generative energy and creative immediacy.
About the Event
The artist himself describes his process as originating in “internal stimuli” - moments of intuitive urgency that prompt an almost cathartic release of energy onto the canvas. By working directly on the ground, in a horizontal orientation reminiscent of action painting, he allows gravity, fluidity, and gesture to dictate the movement of pigment across the surface. The resulting compositions are charged with psychological intensity, embodying a dynamic interplay between control and chance.
From a theoretical perspective, Konnyu’s work engages with notions of the unconscious, embodiment, and affect. These paintings are not merely aesthetic artifacts, but active sites of transformation - capable of eliciting a slow-building, deeply affective response in the viewer. They resist immediate comprehension, instead inviting prolonged engagement and introspection. They function as thresholds between interiority and exteriority, between individual memory and collective resonance.
Konnyu’s approach aligns with the tradition of gestural abstraction and contemporary abstract painting, where presence and emotion are embedded directly into the surface. His use of scale, texture, and energy reflect not just personal expression, but an exploration of universal states through material encounter.
The decision to present this exhibition in Shenzhen - a city widely recognized as a hub of technological innovation and cultural dynamism - is particularly resonant. As the southern Chinese epicenter of research, design, and digital enterprise, Shenzhen offers a compelling backdrop for Konnyu’s ongoing inquiry into artistic process and transformation. His integration of traditional painterly methods with digital experimentation mirrors the city’s own synthesis of heritage and futurity.
Innovation in Art is thus not merely a title, but a curatorial proposition: an invitation to consider how art may function as a mode of inquiry, a vehicle for emotional and cognitive transformation, and a lens through which to examine the evolving conditions of perception and subjectivity in the 21st century.
László Erdész
Chief Curator of the Exhibition
Critical Acclaim
“The artist creates under the influence of a force that overrides the self — a state of pure
presence in which ‘nothing else’ exists.”
