Árpád Forgó (*1972), visual artist, living and working in Budapest, Hungary.

He is a representative of the long-tradition shaped canvas movement in the Hungarian contemporary art scene. He has exhibited widely, including solo shows with Schlieder Contemporary (Frankfurt), Anya Tish Gallery (Houston), Rómer Flóris Museum of Art and History (Győr, Hungary), and two-person exhibitions at Gallery Biesenbach, Cologne; BABEL Art Space, Trondheim and KKKC, Klaipeda, Lithuania. He participated in group shows at prestigious institutions, including the Ludwig Museum and Vasarely Museum (Budapest), Museum Ritter (Waldenbuch) and Rothko Museum (Daugavpils). Artist-in-residence programs have always played significant role in his career; among others, he was invited by the Vermont Studio Center (USA), the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (USA), Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects (Australia), Montresso Art Foundation (Morocco), and most recently by CCA Andratx in Mallorca, Spain. He was a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee in the years 2019-2020.

Árpád Forgó is interested in experimental painting, in the question of broadening the interpretation of non-figurative painting by keeping its painting feature and by exploring the borderline between painting and sculpture. Structure, shape, measurements and rhythm together with planar and spatial relationships are the focuses of his research. He investigates the relation between one and several, the issue of cardinality, oneness, unity and division, the whole and the segment. He mainly works with traditional painting materials - paint, canvas and wood-; aiming for industrial perfection, still keeping the craftsmanship of the process.

He has been researching modularity and perception, which he considers exciting fields to expand boundaries of a wall work. He keeps developing shaped canvas panels and through isometric transformations, building block-like, hollow, symmetrical or unsymmetrical modular compositions. He also experiments intensively with different compound painting processes in order to challenge the viewer’s perception not only by the structure but also by the material.

Currently, he is working on the Formula set, which is a synthesis of his earlier series.

The Trinity series is a set of works built from three shaped canvas modules, that were also compositional elements of the earlier Diagonal Compositions set. First pieces of Trinity were created in 2019, during the Josef and Anni Albers artist residency program in Connecticut, and developed further at the residency program of Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakech in 2023. The works together visualise a playful alphabet of variations and colours. They all have the feature of asymmetry.

Formula is still an ongoing project of the artist, and its title refers to the idea that each work possess the same dimension, but each of them visualises different tactile, geometrical, colour perception concepts. In this series, Forgó merges techniques he has been working with in the past ten years, as well as the results of his experimentation with different painting materials. Formula started as a continuation of his research with the shaped canvas, but soon it turned out that the limitation of size provokes further visual solutions and opens new directions. Formula is a playful synthesis of earlier series, the rigid geometry and intense colour combinations of the shaped canvas Orthogonal Compostions (2025-2018), the translucent surfaces and dynamism of the Diagonal Compostions (2018-2022), or the delicate appearance of wood in the Konstruktivistisk series (2016-2018) are all present. Walking through the exhibition, looking at the works, an exciting visual and associative story is evolving; the viewer’s personal storyboard is unfolding. An experience of colour, space, structure, geometry and rhythm.

Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions