ZOLTAN GERLICZKI

REPRESENTED ARTIST

Zoltan Gerliczki was born in Nyíregyházain, Hungary in 1971 and he was raised in a Budapest orphanage during Hungary’s Communist regime. He is a filmmaker, painter, and computer artist who currently works as a graphic designer in Antwerp, London, Paris, and New York. As a graphic designer and post-production artist he has been involved with various publications including Elle Décor, House Beautiful, Zoo Magazine, Io Donna, Departures (US), Cosmopolitan (France), Paris Review, Travel & Leisure, and The Guardian UK, among others. Commercially, he has also been involved with Thierry Mugler, Christian Lacroix, Illy, and L’Artisan Parfumeur Paris, among others. Gerliczki is now emerging as a consummate artist breaking boundaries between the various mediums he works within.

ARTWORKS

Vegetables from my garden series

"We eat vegetables from our garden”. When Zoltan's gardening, He grows things and gain knowledge by spending time outside - which helps keep his grounded. He loves to garden every day: there is something about the dirt and growing living plants that helps to settle his soul and helps his feel alive. He learned that what we need in our lives is in nature, right in front of us. These still-life images are from his “Vegetables from my Garden” series, which focuses on how gardens help the environment by reducing air and noise pollution, filtering the groundwater, and providing better food on our tables. It’s dedicated to the natural living in the world. Every picture features mushrooms or tomatoes, onions, and salads. The series was made using scenography, for which he used a flatbread scanner to create the images, combined with digital photography. He tries to keep his photography as pure as possible without post-processing. One of the most exciting things about scenography is that it is a new way to see the things around us. It's not exactly photography, but it reproduces reality with extraordinary precision!

Flemish still life series

As an artist, He is fascinated by the opulence and richness of still life of the golden age of Dutch painting in the 17th c. These works, of course, symbolize mortality and the temporal nature of material goods. In his still life, He built these images with the same symbolic references but with the best quality, you can get. By playing with light and dark, He captures the beauty of every flower and each object down to the smallest detail. In addition to photography, he uses high-resolution scans to achieve extreme detail. He use photography as a base, but in the end, he arrive at an image that nobody could actually shoot as a photograph.He is not a photographer in the traditional sense, but he does take many pictures and he needs a lot of layers. In his still life of flowers and objects, he creates a balance between objects and living materials with light and shadow and the best quality. He created the photographic illusion of a painting from the golden age in a new tech way by scanning every object individually and combining these with photographs that he took. The construction takes a lot of time and months of post-production. In his work, everything has to be perfect. It’s like a movie. The light and color have to be right. (It is quite obsessive work.) He loves the idea of “the impossible image” – the idea of there being no limits and of using the photograph as the basis for an image that’s in his head.

The Broken Planet Series

In my series called “Broken Planet," I am showing one Broken Planet with 13 other “planets” based on the most common human feelings or behavior such as happiness, sadness, anger, anticipation, fear, loneliness, jealousy, disgust, trust, greed, joy, racism, shame.
In these images, I am working with various shreds of colored glass and other detritus which I picked up on the streets near my home in Atlanta, during the period of COVID-19 quarantine and the political protests. I assemble these pieces in the studio and rephotograph them to symbolize the current crisis of political and environmental issues. At this moment, the most pressing questions of our time are about ourselves and the future of our culture and our planet. In a sense, I am taking the pieces and putting them back together to re-construct a fragmented world.
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” -Albert Einstein

Fauna Series

“I am presenting women as powerful as any man. Each woman is decorated with the most common and beautiful flowers. Each picture is powerful in color, energetic, and pure in nature, their expression is innocent.” Your images point toward qualities of women that go largely unseen, yet you seek to reveal through beauty and wonder. The colors and shapes perfectly illustrate the idea of “beauty and wonder” in a way that only nature could produce. Your painterly photos are portraits that use the feminine body as a canvas, showing the viewer each subject’s personality, expressiveness and mystery. The sense of fluid movement creates aesthetic tensions between the contrasting lights and darks in the photos, placing the viewer in a dream-like world of compositions where surreal figures are juxtaposed against painterly frames - layered on top of one another in a way that compresses space and altars the context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where sensuous body figures merge with the environment and transform to become new compositional structures. These imaginary worlds remove the viewer from their commonly understood vantage points because it’s impossible to know where the photographer’s eye is in relationship to the subjects. Using this technique you take the viewer into more surreal, magical worlds. By compositionally emphasizing light and color through selective focus, you create compositions that promote feelings of delicacy and gracefulness. You put the viewer in a position to speculate what and where it is they are seeing. Because of this, the images evoke ideas around vantage points, perception, and imagination. There is a sense of silence, softness, and a fluid movement into alternate realities within these photographs and the use of color as a transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what you see into what you would like others to see adds a layer of depth to the work that is appreciated by viewers from all walks of life.

The Broken Celebrity Series

I use photography as a base, but in the end, I really want to arrive at an image that nobody could actually shoot as a photograph. Photographs are the foundation for my images, so I have to shoot a lot of photographs of the things in my images to use as raw material in my images. I know exactly what I want to create and I work from an archive of photographs. I really like extremely hi-tech quality because I want to get the very best that I can get out of a picture.