Between Spaces
(2026)
Gábor Palotai
8 - 25 Oct
Torsplan 12. 16th Floor
Between Spaces
Gábor Palotai moves between art, graphic design and visual communication, exploring how form, colour, rhythm and structure shape the way we see. The exhibition brings these worlds together, creating a space where boundaries dissolve and graphic precision meets artistic freedom.
HAS ON GABOR PALOTAI
Gábor Palotai occupies a rare position in Swedish visual culture. For more than four decades, he has moved between art and graphic design with an uncompromising visual language entirely his own.
His work is everywhere – from books, posters and cultural institutions to identities that have become part of Sweden’s visual landscape. Yet behind the precision of his design practice is something deeply artistic: an ongoing exploration of symbols, abstraction, repetition, perception and how we read images.
Palotai’s influence is matched by extraordinary recognition. His work has received numerous Red Dot Design Awards, including several Best of the Best distinctions, as well as German Design Awards, Guldägget, Swedish Book Art awards and Svenska Designpriset. He was named Designer of the Year in 2019 and received Svenska Tecknare’s Prisa! award in 2025 for his contribution to Swedish visual culture.
For HAS, this is precisely what makes Gabor so interesting. He refuses the boundary between artist and designer. His practice demonstrates that visual communication can become art, and that rigorous systems can produce something poetic, strange and deeply human.
That space in between is exactly where HAS wants to be.
Artist
Gábor Palotai
In this exhibition Gábor Palotai presents the multifaceted nature of his artistic practice. Spanning many years, his oeuvre encompasses a wide range of media and motifs. His practice began with conceptual photography, followed by early modern collage and latemodern grid-based projects, post-minimalism, and postmodern digital art. It subsequently expanded into new media art, experimental graphic films, visual identities, and environmental and multidisciplinary graphic design. His interdisciplinary approach to visual communication is often reinforced by combining different media. His experimental interpretations spanning genres and often employing mixed techniques, his works unfold within the expansive aesthetic and visual-cultural landscape of our time. Digital films, animations, books and painting presented here as push the boundaries of vision, perception, and reality, functioning as a kind of transgression between real and virtual space.
Dissolving the Boundary Between Art and Design.
Gábor Palotai works at the intersection of fine art and graphic design. For him, design is not simply a practical or commercial activity. It can also be an autonomous artistic practice. His posters, books, identities and patterns often function both as communication and as work of art. One of the most important characteristics of Gábor Palotai’s oeuvre is that he does not regard graphic design merely as an applied discipline. In his work, commissioned graphic design and autonomous artistic creation emerge from essentially the same visual way of thinking. Several professional sources emphasize this deliberate connection between design and fine art in his practice.
In a traditional understanding, the graphic designer communicates something, while the fineartist creates or expresses something. In Gábor Palotai’s work, however, there is no such sharp distinction. A poster, a book, an identity system, or a pattern does not merely communicate information; it creates an autonomous visual world. For this reason, in the case of Gabor Palotai, it may be more accurate to speak not simply of a graphic style, but a visual mode of thinking.
Overall, Gábor Palotai’s art occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of Central European and Scandinavian graphic culture. His education in Budapest connects him to the modern constructive tradition of Central Europe, while his work in Stockholm places him within the context of Scandinavian design culture. These influences, however, are not simply added together. They are transformed into a distinctive and highly consistent visual language. At the centre of this language is the transformation of sign into form, form into system, and system into an autonomous visual world. This is what makes Gábor Palotai’s work particularly relevant not only to graphic design, but also to contemporary art.
More information: Wikipedia Gábor Palotai / gaborpalotai.com
Date
Vernissage: THURSDAY OCTOBER 8th, at 18 - 21
Torsplan 12, Stockholm
16th floor
Artist and Curator presentation at 19
OCT 8 - 25
Open daily 10-16
Artist
Gábor Palotai
About
Gabor Palotai is a Hungarian-Swedish artist and designer whose distinctive visual language moves effortlessly between contemporary art, graphic design and visual communication. Through form, colour, symbols and carefully constructed systems, he explores how images shape meaning and how familiar visual codes can be transformed into something entirely new.
Over several decades, Palotai has established himself as one of Sweden’s most internationally recognised graphic designers, receiving numerous Swedish and international awards for his work. His practice spans art, design, books, identities and cultural collaborations, always characterised by a remarkable precision and a strong conceptual core.
At HAS, these different strands come together. The exhibition opens a space between art and graphic design, structure and intuition, clarity and ambiguity — revealing a practice in which boundaries are not fixed, but continuously reimagined.
CREDITS
Gábor Palotai would like to thank HAS for the opportunity to exhibit, and all HIS current and former colleagues and friends for their support and collaboration throughout the years.