Viktor Koen’s and Istvan Banyai’s work is featured in an exhibition looking at today’s political climate at The School of Visual Arts in NYC.
Viktor Koen and Istvan Banyai are part of a select grouping of 53 illustrators, cartoonists and animators featured in “Art as Witness: Political Graphics 2016-18” at the School of Visual Arts in New York. This powerful and inspiring exhibition shows us how, in today’s political climate, artists are using satire to record and respond to the current state of affairs.
For this exhibition, Viktor Koen resurrects Alecto, an artwork that premiered at the Benaki Museum, in Athens in June 2018 as part of the International Athens Photo Festival in Greece.
As one of the three furies in the Greek mythology, “Alecto personifies an abrupt and violent awakening of demons deeply rooted in our culture of inequality, use and abuse. She is also quite possibly the visceral expression of unbearable angst and fits of desperation in having no say in rapid changes to our moral landscape, to the value of truth and the banality of greed”, says the artist. “Wrath might be one of the seven mortal sins but maybe the appropriate reaction against the perpetration of the other six combined. Is this just an angry piece or a piece of broken mirror?”
3 pieces from acclaimed illustrator Istvan Banyai are exhibited at SVA, all showing the absurdity of the authority ruling our contemporary world. Constantly questioning society’s conventions, Istvan Banyai has worked with many leading American magazines and newspapers including (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Istvan enjoys exploring people’s relation to media, consumerism and politics with a great sense of humor. The artist likes to describe his work as “a combination of European absurdity mixed with some American urban post pop gestures, all nonsense used to make sense.”
