ÁDÁM DÓRA

Ádám Dóra’s solo exhibition entitled Fast Lane to Happiness presents a selection of his newest paintings depicting objects and landscapes from the fields of fashion, gastronomy, design and tourism.

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The central motif of Ádám Dóra’s paintings is the interest of the consumer behaviours of Western societies.
In his grotesque, comic figurative paintings, he delights in transforming form and colour into exaggerated expressions.

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Following the tradition of abstract painting, the young artist was influenced by art historical movements of Fauvism, the German Expressionist tradition and contemporary painters such as André Butzer and Albert Oehlen. His paintings are characterised by strong colours, bold brushwork, unsettling gestures, crudely drawn, exaggerated figures and bold shades.

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Ádám Dóra focuses his painting on the role of consumption in identity formation, on the symbols of the materialistic, reflexive lifestyle of people living in capitalist economic systems. His paintings are a mirror that re- fers back to our everyday functioning, to the mechanisms of the world around us, to the different urban conditions, to the larger cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By taking our everyday objects out of context and reflecting on the phenomena of popular culture, he elevates them to the level of fine art. He does this with classical painterly problems, but with a playful imagery and a loose abstract style. He brings contemporary painting to a wider audience through content that can be understood to all.

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Individualism and materialism are at the forefront of the values of a large proportion of young people. What we wear, how we wear it, what or where we eat, or what objects we surround ourselves with are part of our identity, a means of communicating with the outside world. Today, we increasingly define ourselves and our environment in terms of these values. Fortunately, the younger generation is now speaking out against over-consumption, realising the unsustainable nature of this consumerism, which is responsible for the significant damage it is doing to the planet.

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Ádám Dóra’s earlier painting cycle, which dominated his painting between 2020 and 2023 and with which he burst into the Hungarian art scene, reflected on the sneaker culture of varied colour and form, which has undergone a radical paradigm shift since they were first invented in England in the 1860s for the upper crust playing croquet and tennis. It was made a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s by basketball, hip-hop and breakdancing: the joint rise of Michael Jordan and Nike Air, and the style of Run DMC on Adidas. The impact of these two stories has made shoes more than a practical necessity; they are a powerful form of self-expression that says a lot about our personalities and lifestyles. Nowadays, with all the hype and marketing around different products/models, we look at ordinary products as the holy grail.

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The latest image on show in the Apollo Gallery explores the themes of fast food in cycles. The abstract but still-life-like depictions of burg- ers, fries and pizza slices, as in other periods of art, provide a meaningful insight into the eating and consumption habits of the time. In the 1920s, the epoch-making films Super Size Me or Fast Food Nation pioneered the way in which society was made aware of the corporate influence of the fast food industry, which encouraged poor diets for its own profit and gain, thus triggering a broad debate on public eating habits and raising awareness of the importance of conscious eating.

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But also making his debut in this exhibition are his paintings of suitcases, sunglasses and sandy beaches, conceived around the idea of travel and tourism, which shed light on an aspect of Western society’s unreflective consumption of culture through art.

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With a clear but satirical aesthetic, Ádám Dóra’s works engage in a discourse on con- sumer society through the symbols of popuular culture, representing the era of the 1920s through the iconography of her paintings