Márton Nemes: Law of Attraction
The gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Budapest-based artist Márton Nemes (b. 1986, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) and his first exhibition with the gallery, which also marks the artist’s first solo in New York City. Law of Attraction features new multimedia wallworks and large sculptural installations that expand Nemes’ distinctive use of graffiti-inspired fluorescent paints, industrial materials, and architectural scale. Merging electronic audio elements, tinted mirrors, LED lights, painted canvas and metal, Nemes creates a multisensory environment that blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and experience.
Nemes represented Hungary at the 2024 Venice Biennale with Techno Zen—a presentation organized by Ludwig Museum in Budapest—that fused rave culture with meditative traditions in a luminous, immersive environment. That same dichotomy, of chaos and control, noise and stillness, the transcendent and the industrial, courses throughout his practice.
The artist’s earliest creative outlet was graffiti: growing up in a post- industrial region of Hungary, Nemes painted fluorescent murals on the walls of abandoned factories and buildings—spaces that pulsed with a promise of reinvention. That formative experience of transforming derelict structures into vibrant fields of color continues to animate his practice today.
Deeply informed by his immersion in techno subcultures across Berlin, London, and Eastern Europe, Nemes draws on the visual grammar of rave culture—its atmosphere of release, collectivity, and psychic intensity—and his background in industrial design to develop layered, three dimensional objects that are equally architectural and emotional. In works that glow, reverberate, and hum with energy, he constructs a multisensory language that explores our increasingly hybrid digital-physical lives.
The exhibition features new works from the artist’s Irreversible Paintings and Path Paintings series, vivid compositions that juxtapose painted canvas with enamel-coated steel, tinted mirror, and LED elements. These layered constructions push beyond the two-dimensional frame, creating immersive wall pieces that oscillate between painting and environment. In several large-scale installations, canvas and steel are interwoven with pop gestures and geometric abstraction, forming panels that feel both machine-cut and hand-built, raw and futuristic.
Two works from Nemes’ ongoing Stereo Paintings series will also be featured, incorporating sound elements that expand the visual experience into an ambient, multisensory environment. Echoing the interplay of hand and machine in Nemes’s works, this series is built upon a resonant foundation of natural field recordings, fused with distorted, low-end pulses. The soundscape where church bells and nature’s own reverberations conjoin with industrial textures pulls the listener into a meditative, almost sacral space. Here, techno evolves into more than a framework; it stands as a ritual edifice, both reverent and intimately physical.
“Everything is a remix,” Nemes says, citing his generation’s embrace of sampling and layered reference. His compositions may suggest sculptural paintings, but they also hint at cityscapes, microchips, DJ booths, church altars, or the blinking trance of a dance floor at dawn.
Much like the beat patterns that anchor a techno track, Nemes’s works pulse with repetition, rhythm, and spatial intensity. In some pieces, Expressionist paint drips and stains are outlined in laser-cut and powder-coated stainless steel—a nod to the artist’s interest in subverting painterly affect through mechanical precision. These works recall the formal experimentation of artists like Frank Stella—whose geometric to baroque evolution finds an echo in Nemes’s own approach—but also the bold color sensibility of the Pictures Generation and the spatial logic of architectural minimalism.
Nemes received an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London. His work is included in the Central Bank of Hungary Art Collection, Budapest; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; and MODEM Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre, Debrecen, Hungary.
