Bence Magyarlakı

Bence Magyarlaki is a Hungarian artist born in 1992 currently based in Paris. He graduated with First Class Honours-from BA Fine Art (Hons) at Central Saint Martins, London in 2017. His latest body of work has been supported by Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakech. He has been exhibiting in Paris, Marrakech, Istanbul, Sydney, Lisbon and London with Galerie IAWT, Montresso Art Foundation , Galeria Foco (2021), Martch Art Project, Jerico Contemporary(2020), M.A.H Gallery, PADA Studios (2019), The Swith Gallery, UX ArtSpace (2018), and Saatchi Gallery, Gasworks Gallery. His work was nominated for The MullenLowe NOVA Awards (2017), and The International Takifuji Art Award (2017). Magyarlaki’s sculpture and installation work explores the tension between architectural containment and the gestural, social body. In the intuitive process of uniting architectural and body language, the artist uses body memory as his site of production. Each shape therefore is an expression of a sensation remembered or revisited, often referencing the intimacy of one’s own body, or its relatedness and relative position to another. While the sculptures are made of hard casting materials used in architecture to create walls, separations and surfaces (concrete, plaster) the final shapes perform bends and twists alien to the physical properties of these materials. This softness and malleability is more than a trick of sensations. It is an invitation the reconsider the fixity of form, it is an expression of a dynamic capacity for movement or change. Instead of considering the body as oppressed by architecture – thatappears here as a representation of societal control – the artist is proposing the body’s transformative potential within itself and on the societal structures that control and police its desires. The sculptures offer an invitation for a more tactile, corporeal relationship with the object of art and the viewer, themselves acting like social bodies with desires and repressions.