SHINE ON ME LIKE IT’S NOTHING – Solo show at Hungarian Photographic Association / 2023
Curated by Zita Sarvari
Photos by Andris Zombori
DUKAI’s works employ digitally prepared, precise stencil motifs and a monochrome color palette that direct attention to texture, material elements, and form. These works are entirely objective and non-referential, and can be linked to the artistic approach of American minimal art, the motif world of repetitive structures in electronic music, and the aestheticism of brutalist architecture.
The works—composed of concentric bands and stripes, painted with black acrylic on raw canvas—are at once austere, exacting, strict, and imposing, yet also velvety, diagrammatic, and at the same time tactile and sensuous.
In his creative process, Dukai most often favors raw, unadorned materials, thereby emphasizing the traditional ideals of craftsmanship and art. His works are largely made from the reuse of handwoven, used sackcloth—often decades old—which he dyes with natural tanning agents. Within his practice, a dynamic tension emerges between the natural and the artificial, the analog and the digital, the traditional and the technocratic.
