Simon Vinzenz  Klausen

We warmly welcome everyone to Simon Vinzenz Klausen's exhibition,

MECHANICAL METROPOLIS.

Opening:

Monday, July 28, 2025, at 7 p.m. at the

Viadukt Bar (1052 Budapest, Jane Haining rakpart)

The exhibition will be opened by:

Szilvia Varró, art manager

The exhibition will be open until August 10, every day from 11 a.m. to midnight.

Simon Vinzenz Klausen is presenting his works to the art-loving public for the first time. Seeing his drawings, Hundertwasser encouraged him to develop his talent even as a child.

The Hungarian-born artist, who has lived in Munich until now, devoted his life to his art for 15 years, avoiding the public eye. Through painting and drawing, he found the formal language that became decisive for his self-expression. From more than 100 oil paintings, we have selected the images that will be on display in Budapest for the first time, prior to his exhibitions in Berlin and New York.

Roberta Smith, contemporary art critic for The New York Times, is also a fan of S. V. Klausen.

The images in MECHANICAL METROPOLIS take us into the strange, grotesque world of Simon Vinzenz Klausen. The tower blocks, pulsating with vibrant colors, suggest a hectic restlessness. Human beings appear here and there in this futuristic environment, wandering lost in the urban machinery, becoming zombies, unable to connect with each other.

Klausen explores issues of existentialism and social alienation. In a world dominated by technology, people can lose Sartrean freedom because their decisions are influenced by external systems (e.g., AI-based applications), causing an existential crisis because individuals cannot authentically define their own values. People are reduced to data sets controlled by algorithms. Digital technologies—smartphones and social media—make human relationships superficial and can create new forms of isolation.

In Klausen's visual language, urban anxiety is heightened to the extreme. In this, he finds a stylistic connection with 1920s German painting, especially George Grosz, whose satirical paintings simultaneously depict the fragmented spaces of futurism, populated by the lonely, disillusioned, repulsive figures of contemporary Weimar Republic Berlin. In Klausen's work, these kaleidoscopic figures are much more hidden, melting into the elements of the big city that surrounds them with wide-open eyes staring at us. Humanity disappears, there is no trace of intimate encounters, and the soul is replaced by urban facelessness.

Klausen's images are noteworthy, among other things, because the artist uses his unique visual tools to simultaneously draw on the futuristic, socially critical realism of the 1920s, while updating it to the extreme, uncertain, grotesque play world of our time, whose brightly colored building blocks rise into ever higher towers and sway around us with increasing uncertainty, yet still leave room for the grotesque world of play, whose brightly colored building blocks rise into ever higher towers and sway around us with increasing uncertainty, yet still leave open the possibility that they may eventually connect with each other as construction continues.

The uniqueness and relevance of Klausen's art lies in his ability not only to give form to this deeply rooted, generation-uniting experience and express it in the language of painting, but also to convey the instinctive desire for human connection that grows out of it, which speaks to all of us and about all of us.