Attila Szűcs – Portraits of the Last Golden Age

Portraits of the Last Golden Age is the latest major monograph on the work of Budapest-based artist Attila Szűcs (b.1967, Miskolc, Hungary), one of the leading painters in Hungary today. Following on from his 2016 monograph, Specters and Experiments, published by Hatje Cantz, Portraits of the Last Golden Age features a substantial in-conversation between Szűcs and Sándor Hornyik, an art historian, curator, and senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. "Mankind is in an extremely tense situation," Szűcs asserts, "with the escalation of natural disasters, with artificial intelligence getting out of hand, the world can easily take a dystopian turn." During the course of the conversation, the two men discuss topics ranging from portraiture to posthumanism, meditation to metaphysics, intuition to the irrational.

In addition to presenting examples of Szűcs’ accomplished and haunting monochrome works on paper employing materials such as acrylic, charcoal, and graphite, the publication features over seventy oil paintings made between 2019 and 2023 depicting dark dreamscapes and transcendental scenes of alternate realities. Disembodied hands grab or caress, as if apparitions from another dimension; sleeping figures exhale multi-colored breath that verges on the supernatural; long golden hair flows down the side of a bed, pooling on the floor like an uncanny waterfall; heads float in dark water as if decapitated; otherworldly fires rage while apocalyptic explosions highlight environmental disasters and humankind’s seemingly unstoppable drive towards auto-destruction. Szűcs’ work is both an exploration into the human psyche and into the universe itself, much of which is as-yet unknown: quantum worlds and multiverses, the complexities of time and space, and the possibilities of an afterlife. Bleak yet beautiful, dark yet dazzling, Szűcs’ practice asks what painting can bring to twenty-first century thinking and image-making.

Produced by Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest, and co-published by Anomie Publishing, London, the publication features texts in English and Hungarian (translated by Dániel Sipos), was designed by Géza Ipacs, and printed and bound by EPC Nyomda, Budaörs.