Noble Art Nexus – Light and Memory

Noble Art Nexus is a contemporary art gallery and art advisory platform based in Budapest, with a strong international presence and exhibition program. The gallery focuses on artists with distinctive, individual visual languages whose work creates a natural dialogue between cultural heritage and contemporary artistic thinking. In recent years, artists represented by Noble Art Nexus have participated in international art events in London, New York, Vienna, Stockholm, Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore. The gallery also took part in Budapest Contemporary in 2025.

For Budapest Contemporary 2026, Noble Art Nexus will present a selection of works by two artists with roots in Uzhhorod whose painterly languages are markedly different yet deeply complementary: Taras Tabaka and Andrew Manaylo / Manajló András.

The central concept of the booth explores the transformation of light, memory and nature.

In Taras Tabaka’s paintings, the recognizable world — landscape, water, flowers and the horizon — gradually moves toward abstraction. Concrete visual reality gives way to light, atmosphere and memory. His background in architecture and monumental painting provides compositional discipline, while his painterly gestures remain free and intuitive. Born in Uzhhorod in 1965, Tabaka has been active for more than three decades in international exhibitions and contemporary art projects, both as a painter and as a curator.

Andrew Manaylo represents the third generation of the Manaylo artistic dynasty. Building on a classical academic foundation acquired in Lviv and St. Petersburg, he developed the expressive and layered visual language that defines his work today, where figuration, abstraction, light and emotion merge into one another. His works are held in Hungarian state collections, museum collections and international private collections, and his career has been accompanied by exhibitions across Europe, the United States and Asia. In 2023–2024, the Tragor Ignác Museum presented a solo exhibition focusing on a period of his abstract oeuvre, followed in 2025 by a solo exhibition at the Embassy of Hungary in London.

Placing the two artists side by side creates a deliberate dialogue. Tabaka transforms the external world into memory; Manaylo transforms inner experience into image. In one body of work, nature dissolves into abstraction; in the other, emotion searches for form. The unity of the booth is therefore not created by a shared style, but by a shared question: how can painting make something beyond the visible world — memory, silence, energy or emotion — perceptible?

The presentation is conceived as a clean and spacious installation in which larger-scale works are given their own visual space. Rather than displaying a large number of works, the concept creates a dialogue between Tabaka and Manaylo through a focused selection of strong individual paintings.

Highlighted Artworks / Series

Andrew Manaylo – Echoes of Light and Shadow

One of the focal points of the Budapest Contemporary presentation will be Andrew Manaylo’s Echoes of Light and Shadow series.

The series takes nature — and particularly the floral motif — as its point of departure, but Manaylo does not approach it in a botanical or decorative sense. The flower is only the beginning of the painterly process: forms break apart into layers and gradually dissolve into light, shadow, texture and gesture. Nature becomes a metaphor for emotion.

One of the characteristic works from the series is “Embers Beneath the Petals” (2025, 100 × 100 cm, oil on canvas). Warm amber tones emerging between dark and light floral forms seem to illuminate the composition from within. The underlying idea of the work is the strength that exists beneath apparent fragility: the “embers” in the title suggest a restrained yet continuously present inner energy.

A recurring theme throughout the series is the tension between light and darkness. In Manaylo’s paintings, light does not simply illuminate the forms; it becomes an active painterly force in its own right — breaking through them, transforming them, or at times bringing them into existence.

This gives the Echoes of Light and Shadow series both immediate visual impact and deeper complexity — a body of work that can engage the viewer at first sight while continuing to reveal new structures and meanings over time.

Taras Tabaka – Nature and Memory

Nature also serves as the point of departure in the works by Taras Tabaka selected for Budapest Contemporary, although in an entirely different way. His seascapes, flowers and landscapes gradually lose their specific geographic or material identity and begin to resemble memories or dreams.

A strong example is “Ephemeral Waves, Timeless Dreams” (2025, 80 × 120 cm, oil on canvas), in which the boundary between sea and sky nearly dissolves. The central idea of the painting is impermanence itself: a wave is born, rises and disappears, just as moments and memories emerge and gradually fade in our lives.

In this way, Tabaka’s works enter into a natural visual dialogue with Manaylo’s paintings: while in Manaylo’s work emotions assume forms drawn from nature, in Tabaka’s work nature is transformed into a personal emotional space.