Éva Forgács

Forces and Harmonies

Vertical. István Nádler’s New Painting.
An Exhibition at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art.
April 11– June 1, 2008

 

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Clarity, concentration and harmony are one’s basic impressions on viewing the paintings. The show exudes the kind of peace and tranquillity that one usually experiences in the presence of classical art.
Nádler is usually considered an abstract painter, for he paints non-figurative pictures. His works of the last fifteen years or so, however, raise the question of just what this categorisation means. Piet Mondrian, in many ways, though not entirely, Nádler’s kindred spirit, defined himself as an “abstract-realist” painter, one who was committed to the “reality” of natural things, but who, instead of painting the appearance of visible objects, visualised their relations. “Nature moves me deeply, I just paint it differently,” he wrote, “the more the natural is abstracted, the more pronounced is the expression of relationship.”1 Relations, Mondrian was convinced, were every bit as real as visible objects. Nádler, for his part, paints not the abstract essence of real objects, but makes visible the relations of the non-material world.
Most of Nádler’s works come in series. Some are in pairs, others in series of eight or more canvases, and many of his themes are developed in sets of four pictures, which remind one of the four-movement structures of a symphony. Nádler has long been known to derive more than inspiration from music. Music, particularly contemporary and Far-Eastern music, also serves him with structural models for the interplay of intuition and construction: for how to make visible, in terms of form and rhythm, sensations experienced through what Malevich called “pure sensation”.

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István Nádler: Diptych I. B,
2007, casein tempera, canvas, 240x180cm.
Private Collection

István Nádler: Diptych II. B,
2007, casein tempera, canvas, 240x180cm.
Private Collection

 

Éva Forgács,
former Associate Professor of Art History at the Hungarian Academy of Crafts and Design, is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. She is author of The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (CEU Press, 1995) and co-editor of Between Worlds. A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930 MIT Press, 2002).