Gideon Horváth

Emmanuelle Firman

Venue

Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs

Lyon

Born in 1990 in West Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in Budapest, Hungary

Memory That Could Have Been reflects on strength: Must it always be founded on pride? Might it not equally derive from shame and vulnerability? Can we rethink failure? The three sculptures comprising Gideon Horváth’s work began their lives as a temporary antimonument at Budapest’s Lukács Thermal Bath. Cast in beeswax, a material whose fragile appearance belies its resilience, they were dedicated to the unrealised desires and unlived histories of the city’s LGBTQIA+ communities. The unstable poses of the figures, balancing precariously atop aluminium spheres within the Musée des Tissus’s abandoned niches, were inspired as much by the dancing satyrs and fauns of classical antiquity as they were by the voguing dips and death drops of 1980s New York, dance moves that embrace their own vulnerability and find strength in their shame.

Working primarily through installation and sculpture, Gideon Horváth develops a practice informed by queer theory and shaped by Greco-Roman mythology. Central to his work is the notion of vulnerability, understood as a collective force. The artist seeks to dismantle binary visions of the world – such as the opposition between nature and culture – by challenging the dualistic and hierarchical structures that underpin them.