Gábor Ősz

From Painting to the Process of Light Forming an Image

Ősz was born in Dunaújváros, Hungary, in 1962. After studying painting in Budapest, he established his practice in the Netherlands. His early work included monochrome painting, but his attention shifted from layers of paint to the process by which light forms an image on a support, leading him across photography, moving image, and projection^*1. In an interview, he explained that painting gradually became difficult for him to work with, while photography opened his interest toward other materials^*2.

In a 2010 interview, Ősz explained that although he began as a painting student, his move toward photography around 1989 came from an interest in the process by which light forms an image on matter, rather than in quickly capturing a decisive moment. He also recalled that conventional photographs of the seashore failed to match his experience of its spatial sensation; that gap led directly toward the camera-obscura method of Liquid Horizon. ^*21

From around 1989, when Ősz moved into photography, his work increasingly treated the camera obscura, moving image, projection, and architectural space itself as conditions under which an image comes into being. NW Aalst describes his work in terms of observing reality, the relation between people and space, and reflecting on the moment an image is produced and perceived^*3. Ludwig Museum’s retrospective catalogue likewise places his work against the older photographic expectation of “accurate depiction of reality,” emphasizing his examination of technology, light, perception, and the camera’s basic functions^*22.

Liquid Horizon—Turning the Observation Bunker Itself into a Camera

Liquid Horizon, developed from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, converted observation bunkers along the Atlantic Wall, the German coastal defense system built during World War II, into darkrooms. Light entering through openings facing the sea was exposed for long periods onto photosensitive material inside, making the architecture itself the camera^*4.

Kunstmuseum Den Haag records Liquid Horizon N°8, Fécamp as a C-print made with a camera obscura in 2000^*23. The span of its quiet horizon is determined by the observation opening in the Fécamp bunker, the depth of its walls, and the building’s orientation toward the sea.

With long exposure, persistent elements—the sea, horizon, and contours of concrete—remain, while passersby and temporary movement recede from the image. Ludwig Museum emphasizes the work as a structure for experiencing the present through an apparatus inherited from the past, rather than as an illustration of a historical event^*5. The photograph is made from the viewpoint built into the wartime structure itself, rather than from a position outside it.

Camera Architectura—Turning Architecture into a Giant Eye

In The Prora Project, Ősz used the repeated guest rooms of the vast Nazi-era resort complex at Prora as camera obscuras, gathering the exterior world segmented by individual windows into a single image^*6. In Travelling Landscapes, a train becomes the camera; in Permanent Daylight, a caravan does the same, extending the camera from a fixed box into a moving vehicle or inhabited space^*7.

Permanent Daylight depicts greenhouses near Amsterdam where artificial illumination accelerates plant growth at night. Agricultural technology that turns night into day overlaps with exposures that turn several nights of light into a single image, making artificial illumination a shared condition of both production and photography^*8. The subject here is the system that manages light and the apparatus that sustains it.

Images That Expose Their Own Construction—Colours of Black and White and Blow-Up

Alongside the camera obscura, Ősz has also reversed relationships between color and black-and-white, negative and positive, projection and screen.Colours of Black and White photographs a scene painted in color on black-and-white negative film, making visible the rule by which colors are translated into gray values^*9.

In Blow-Up, enlarging a photographic or cinematic image does not recover ever-clearer information from the original scene; grain and uncertainty become increasingly prominent. CNAP describes the group of works as a metaphor for entering the image and approaching what is unknown or invisible^*10. Ősz turns the expectation that enlargement can retrieve reality into an encounter with the limits exposed by the image’s own material coarseness.

Das Fenster—How a Dictator’s Window Stages the Landscape

Das Fenster addresses the enormous panoramic window installed at Hitler’s Berghof residence. Because the building no longer exists, Ősz worked from documents, photographs, films, and measurements to reconstruct in moving image the way the window framed the Alpine view as a single political picture^*11.

Van der Grinten Gallery explains that the Berghof’s four-meter-high window framed the Untersberg as one monumental image, and that the mountain itself carried mythic and historical associations^*24. Ludwig Museum’s retrospective likewise places Das Fenster within Camera Architectura, a body of work examining relations among architecture, perception, light, and time^*12.

Van der Grinten Gallery describes this series as Camera Architectura and emphasizes that architectural space itself conditions the production and perception of the image. Ősz treats the window as a specific optical device that determines who occupies the center of the room and which view becomes the backdrop to power. ^*24

Spomen—Turning Monumental Geometry into a Photographic Apparatus

In Spomen, Ősz studied the abstract war memorials known as spomeniks across the former Yugoslavia and built camera obscuras corresponding to their geometric forms. Instead of photographing the monuments frontally, he transfers their forms into the photographic apparatus and asks what kind of field of vision is produced by abstract shapes associated with heroism, sacrifice, and power^*13.

The Eye of Photography notes that the work examines both the relation between image and geometry and the association of abstract form with ideas of heroism, glory, and power^*14. Memory persists here as a habit of seeing the world through those forms.

One-of-a-Kind Direct Images and the Exhibition Space

Many of Ősz’s large-format works are unique direct images made by placing photosensitive material inside architecture and exposing it over long durations. Fondation Francès lists The Liquid Horizon together with information on exposure time, the camera obscura, and support, underscoring that the work records apparatus and duration as much as the landscape photographed^*15.

Because Ősz combines photography, moving image, projection, and gallery spaces converted into darkrooms, the work does not end with a printed image. A review in 1000 Words argues that he brings cameras and projectors to the foreground and redistributes, according to the site, the functions of the person making the image and the person viewing it^*16.

Where Landscape Photography Meets a Critique of the Apparatus

What distinguishes Camera Architectura is not the antiquity of the camera-obscura principle itself, but the use of windows and openings in existing buildings as photographic conditions. Paris-art describes Ősz as turning buildings, greenhouses, and interiors—spaces that look outward through windows, holes, or glass—into image-making devices^*17. The observation slit in Liquid Horizon, the monumental window in Das Fenster, and the guest-room windows at Prora were oriented for military observation, political staging, and mass tourism respectively; those orientations remain embedded in the angle of the resulting images^*24.

Even in relation to other contemporary camera-obscura works, Ősz is distinctive because he does not pursue the optical surprise of an interior containing the exterior view; he retains the historical use of existing architecture as a condition of the photograph itself. Light Art Museum describes the camera obscura as the most elementary device for converting reality into image and notes the circular structure in which light is both the subject and the source that makes the image visible^*18.

The Camera Position Is Set Between Architecture and Photographer

Beginning with monochrome painting, his work developed toward treating the image plane, support, projection, and viewing position as a single system. Fotóművészet organizes Camera Architectura as a system linking Liquid Horizon, Prora, and Das Fenster with the mobile works Travelling Landscapes, Permanent Daylight, and Constructed View^*19.

The significance of the bunker in Liquid Horizon lies in more than its suitability as a dark box. Its opening had been oriented toward the sea since construction, and Ősz places the photosensitive surface without changing that direction. Mois de la Photo likewise describes the bunker as a camera aimed at the sea^*20. The contemporary seascape is therefore recorded through a direction fixed by a military installation for observation, not through a composition freely discovered by the artist.

Openings Carry Earlier Regimes of Vision into the Present Frame

The observation opening in Liquid Horizon, the monumental window in Das Fenster, and the memorial forms referenced in Spomen originally directed human position and sight according to different historical purposes. Ősz inserts photosensitive surfaces or projections into those existing forms and uses them as present-day frames. His method preserves, within the limits of the current image, the earlier condition of where one was positioned and what one was meant to see.

With long exposure, people passing during the exposure and temporary movement fade, while persistent elements such as the bunker, horizon, or artificial illumination remain. In Liquid Horizon, fixed architecture designed for continuous observation of the sea overlaps at the same opening with an exposure that accumulates light over an extended duration^*5. The combination of architectural use and exposure time produces the particular seascape of the series.