The exhibition RUB-A-DUB-DUB marks the first debut solo exhibition in Hungary of the Kosovar artist Jakup Ferri, represented by Ani Molnár Gallery. The internationally acclaimed artist, Ferri – who is also known for representing the Republic of Kosovo at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 – now presents an expansive solo show offering insight into his vivid multifaceted, cross-media practice. The exhibition brings together previously unseen textile works as well as oil paintings and embroideries from his ongoing We We series, providing a comprehensive view of Ferri’s artistic language.
Jakup Ferri’s artistic practice is widely recognised for its vibrant paintings and embroideries, in which encounters between everyday people, animals, and hybrid creatures unfold. Ferri’s compositions are frequently structured around absurd yet playful narratives that draw attention to the clumsiness of everyday life and the fundamental absurdity of existence. His grotesque, childlike visual language and material sensibility equally inspired by Kosovar folk art and the traditions of outsider art. Ferri has been working with textiles for nearly two decades, which for him is not merely an artistic medium, but a social and communal practice. Ferri’s pictorial universe unfolds within a distinctive, flattened spatial logic that evoke, at once, a Busytown Mysteries sequence and the illogical yet strangely systematic order of psychotic dreams. Behind the fundamentally light-hearted and playful tone of Ferri’s works, a subtle and understated political layer unfolds. His intimate scenes evoke the cultural isolation and peripheral condition of his homeland, while focusing on small, enclosed communities—families, friendships, and networks of relationships.