22/07/2026
Exhibition opening by Miklós Hoffmann at 'SPACE-TIME' vernissage:
First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am neither an art historian nor an aesthetician, but a mathematician — something you may very soon come to regret.
From an aesthetician, at an exhibition entitled Space-Time, you would probably hear beautiful sentences about space eroded by time, or about winged time flying through space. Instead, I am going to speak about Einstein’s theory of relativity, and I can only hope that it will become clear why I am speaking about this in connection with these works. In my reading, the works presented here, and the exhibiting artists themselves, reveal different aspects of this paradigm-shifting theory of relativity — even if the artists themselves are not necessarily aware of it. 😊
As you can read in the wall text, all three artists are connected in some way to the tradition of geometric abstract art, which emerged in the 1910s. The essential point of geometric abstraction was that the artwork did not seek to represent the world, but rather to create a new visual order. Its motivation was at once artistic, philosophical, spiritual, technical, and social: to find a new visual language for the modern world. In other words, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the concepts of space, time, form, vision, matter, and reality all became uncertain — and all became fields worthy of rediscovery and rethinking.
Under the influence of the early twentieth-century Zeitgeist, essentially the same process took place in science as well. In the 1910s, Einstein developed the special and general theories of relativity, which fundamentally called into question our basic ideas about space, time, light, and energy — that is, the Newtonian concept of physical world that had prevailed until then.
I would like to present some aspects of this through the works of the three artists exhibited here. Or perhaps the other way around? I would like to present the works of these three artists through the theory of relativity? I am not sure… well, everything is relative.
The first step: Péter Botos — or the creation of new microuniverses, the trapping and release of light. The most important driving force behind Einstein’s theory was the Michelson–Morley experiment, in which they attempted to measure differences in the speed of light depending on whether the light beam set off in the direction of the Earth’s motion or against it. The assumption was that if we send a beam of light in the direction of the Earth’s motion, it should be slightly faster, since the speed of the Earth and the speed of light would add up; if we send it backwards, however, light should be slower, because the two speeds would be subtracted.
But how can this be done? How can light be measured? Either we run after the light beam through real space all the way to the end of the world — hopelessly — or we stop the light with an opaque material, in which case it no longer has any speed. Michelson and Morley’s experimental apparatus sought to follow, examine, trap, and release light again and again within a miniature universe of their own making. From the outside, it appears to be a simple rectangular form; yet if we look inside, we are met with an astonishing richness of exquisitely polished mirrors and prisms, and we can almost feel the pulse of time as the hair-thin beam of light races through the newly created space. Now let us look at Péter Botos’s works with this in mind: when we move close to them, these works, in their richness that unfolds through the reflections of light, create tiny virtual worlds in which we can grasp, almost physically, the emergence of space and time.
Next chapter: Olga Ząbroń — matter as energy, the path of light through curved space. Einstein realised that the inexplicable results of physical experiments could only be resolved if our basic concepts themselves were reconsidered. Is there a difference between light, matter, and energy? Einstein’s theory revealed that light is not mere a “visual appearance”: light carries energy and momentum, as a kind of physical flow of energy. Emitted light can transfer energy to space; rays of light can become lines of force, restructuring space — and with this, we arrive at Olga’s works. For me, these works are spaces densely woven with lines of energy, and for this reason each piece both demands and radiates extraordinary energy: on the one hand, we cannot free ourselves from it; on the other, within the energy field that comes into being, we are recharged both literally and figuratively. And there is something more: what are these restructured spaces like? Perhaps Einstein’s most radical concept discovered when physicists observed that light arriving from distant stars bends as it passes by bodies of great mass. Einstein declared that what is actually changing is not the ray of light itself, but space itself curving in the presence of great mass. In Olga’s images, these concentrations of energy lines evoke the extraordinary tension of curved space, and compel us to rethink even our most stable concept: the three straight dimensions of space.
Final step: Györgyi Bors — racing through spacetime, even if it is our own inner space, and crossing the speed of light. After the failure of the experiments mentioned earlier, Einstein arrived at the astonishing idea that the speed of light is an absolute limit: nothing can be faster than light. But what happens when we approach the speed of light? What do we see if we look out of our train as it rushes through abstract space at the speed of light? According to physicists, phase images then gradually rotate: we see the landscape as a kind of sliced, slowly turning space — just as in some of Györgyi’s paintings. But of course these images are far more than abstract spatial constructions. To use the harsh words of our writer Tibor Keresztury, what we are dealing with here is a kind of self-vivisection: a meticulous deconstruction of the artist’s own soul and body, and of the inner world she perceives. This is why the images we see are profoundly intimate. The colours are playful, while space falls upon us in brutal fragments. These works are at once uplifting and a reminder of our smallness.
Einstein could never have created his theory had he always thought in only one way, and always within prescribed limits. Péter, Olga, and Györgyi, in another age and another spacetime, search for and cross boundaries in the same way, with the same courage and determination — physically, intellectually, and emotionally. If we give time to them, and to their works, we may arrive with them in new spaces; and together, by receiving these works, perhaps we may yet cross the speed of light.
I’m opening the exhibition.
