Visual artist
Róbert Batykó graduated from the Painting Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2005. In recognition of his painting practice, he received the Strabag Art Award’s creative grant in 2007, the Gyula Derkovits Scholarship between 2008 and 2011, was nominated for the Aviva Art Award in 2010, and won the Leopold Bloom Art Award in 2011. He lived and worked in Germany and the Netherlands for an extended period. Since 2007, his works have been presented not only at acb Gallery, but also in all major Hungarian art institutions. In 2018, he received the Hungary Emerging Award, and his works have also been exhibited in New York and Miami.
In 2022, Batykó’s paintings entered major Hungarian public collections, including the Hungarian National Gallery and the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art. The same year saw the publication of a catalogue covering a significant part of his oeuvre, connected to his 2021 retrospective exhibition Zoompark at the Paks Gallery. In his highly consistent body of work, Batykó has increasingly turned toward the poetics of errors in digital coding and the painterly potential of by-products of digital image processing. In his latest series of paintings, the mechanical dragging of paint, a signature gesture of his practice, often appears alongside textual elements.
Batykó reflects on the fundamental questions of post-digital painting: he is interested not only in examining our relationship with digital images, but also in capturing the overwhelming flood of images characteristic of our time through the very process of creating his paintings.