PLATO
ON VIEW
Ákos Ezer
Living Room Campout
September 3 – October 12, 2024
Plato is beyond excited to present Ákos Ezer's (b. 1989) first solo exhibition with the gallery, Living Room Campout. The Hungarian artist’s signature long-limbed characters, both painted and sculpted, so beloved in Europe and Asia, are finally coming to New York, equipped with sports, camping and party gear and ready to teach us lessons in art history, politics and social graces.
The brooding European hipsters in Ezer's works resemble masked actors in Italian commedia dell'arte. Yet contrary to the type-like Pulcinella and Harlequin, Ezer's twisted figures, being his own ever-evolving alter egos, morph and change roles and personalities from painting to painting. Shy wallflowers turn into the souls of the party and trampled losers come out on top. Golf-playing bullies and charcoal burning carnivores transform into garden-planting dreamers. Not necessarily bearing his characters' exact semblance, Ezer identifies with their changing dilemmas and personal and group predicaments. Besides, in a world where the limits of freedom of speech are ever-changing, what and who you depict to express the truth has to be equally fluid.
