Walking in the gallery named after sculptor Barna Ferenc Gácsi is like being in a forest, only instead of trees you can stroll among the extremely lifelike and life-size creations of the artist. He took us on a tour of the exhibition.
As we were looking for the old food processing plant at Siófok’s industrial park, we unsurprisingly found ourselves asking the question: how does anyone come up with the idea of opening an art gallery on the outskirts of Siófok, across the street from an auto repair shop?
Stepping inside the slightly rundown building, we suddenly feel like it all makes sense: the sculptures fit perfectly into the slightly eerie space. Also, carving huge bronze statues weighing several tons and burning gigantic ceramics are by no means quite or clean jobs, but they aren't out of place at an industrial park.
Barna Ferenc Gácsi, who graduated 20 years ago from the University of Fine Arts, has tried every kind of sculpture-making technique there is. He’s worked with wood, bronze, ceramics and stone, and the pieces exhibited in his gallery incorporate some or all of these materials.
Today wood dominates in most of his artworks. The yard is full of heaps of interestingly shaped roots found in the woods and dried out bonsais, which will one day become the horns of a stone bull or the head of some other animal. The artist says he knows how he’s going to use each piece of wood as soon as he finds it – when he returns to the workshop, all he has to do is realize the concept.
He and his wife moved to Siófok three years ago – he says that outside the six-week summer party season Siófok is actually a very nice and liveable town; it’s big enough that he can find all the tools he needs for his art. Since he’s lived there, Balaton sandstone has cropped up as a special element in his pieces from time to time.
By his own admission, his sculptures are the results of a kind of constant soul-searching. The answers he tries to explore with his sculptures are the ones we are all looking for in life: where do we fit in, how do we relate to all the other people in the world. “I’m lucky to have sculpting as a way to express my doubts and big moments,” said Barna as he took us through the exhibition.
He tries to use his sculptures to convey the power of art to everyday people. The statue of the man pulling a heavy weight, which is situated right by the entrance, was completed for the recently held gallery opening. His face screwed up from the struggle, the life-size man is pulling on a hundred-year-old harness that was once used to move enormous weights. What he is dragging behind him is currently made up of a pallet, a mobile phone, medical tools, medicine and a primary school biology textbook.
Why? Because everyone coming to the opening could bring with them one thing that represents a huge burden in their lives in order to put it down physically and symbolically in a quite ceremony. Over the summer the artist is planning on holding more of these ceremonies to collect more items, which he’ll then use to create the final burden of the statue. He doesn’t know yet how to make a whole out of hundreds of objects, but he’ll definitely incorporate every personal item into the huge collection the struggling man will carry.
