CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago is now showing János Megyik Photograms, on view from February 3 through July 8, 2024. This is the first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the work of Hungarian sculptor János Megyik, who in the 1980s made a series of extraordinary, large-scale photograms based on his sculptures.

For six decades, János Megyik (Hungarian, born 1938) has been making poetic investigations of fractal geometry and perspectival systems, motivated by questions of point, line, plane, volume, and all that lies between and beyond their innumerable intersections. In 1983, following a decade spent building constructions from larch wood, the artist started experimenting with the cameraless technique known as the photogram. Megyik placed objects directly upon photographic paper and then exposed them to light, which darkens the exposed areas and reveals shadow-like images of the object.

“The photograms that János Megyik made on his studio floor throughout the 1980s are a stunning marriage of great size with fragility and subtlety – Megyik’s approach to geometry seems at once sober and invitingly mysterious,” said Matthew Witkovsky, Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Although Megyik did not have the legacy of the German Bauhaus immediately in mind, that 1920s art school was greatly enriched by its Hungarian students and professors, who also made a huge impact on Chicago in the 1940s and after. It is a pleasure to show in this city a body of work that holds rigorous abstraction and lyrical beauty in such exquisite tension."

János Megyik Photograms includes 12 large-scale photograms and one wall construction, his sculpture Corpus. All works in the exhibition appear courtesy of the artist and Vintage Galéria, Budapest. János Megyik Photograms is curated by Matthew Witkovsky.