The BOSCH+BOSCH group was founded in 1969 in Subotica by Slavko Matković (Subotica, 1948 – 1994). The group’s name idea came from combining the last name of the painter Hieronymous Bosch, and the name of the West German technological giant Bosch – which they perceived as a signifier of the modern, technological era in which new media needed to be used to achieve one’s (artistic) goals. The group was active until 1976, and the artists continued to create individually.
This multi-national group’s work (with members of Hungarian, Serbian, and Croatian descent) can be interpreted in the line of New artistic practices in ex-Yugoslav art. Bálint Szombathy (Pačir, 1950), László Szalma (Subotica, 1948 – 2004) were in the group since its beginning. During 1971 László Kerekeš (Stara Moravica, 1942 – Berlin, 2001) joined, and respectively Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, 1942) and Attila Csernik (Bačka Topola, 1941) joined in 1973 and Ante Vukov (Subotica, 1955 – 2012) in 1975. The group’s activity took place in the borderline space of Subotica, which is in the border areas of Central Europe and the border area of the Balkans, in a political sense, the outskirts of Eastern Europe. Subotica is a city where, shockingly and incompatibly, Hungarian, Serbian and Croatian cultures meet in their heterogeneous, dispersed and decentralized forms.
Members of the BOSCH+BOSCH group quickly abandoned the pure linguistic (analytic) conceptualism (reism) which was characteristic of the early work of the Slovenian OHO or Novi Sad’s KOD group.
The work of BOSCH+BOSCH deals with abandoning the traditional means of textual representation (pen-paper-book) by approaching the textuality of gestures and thus forming new visual consciousness – the visual experience in the spirit of Arte povera and land art.
The group’s artistic work unfolded in the dominion of spatial interventions, land art, Arte povera, mixed media, project art, conceptual art, visual semiology, new comic, mail art etc. Certain members, parallel with their practical artwork, developed as theorists and art critics (Slavko Matković, Bálint Szombathy). Members of the group exhibited together alongside members of Hungarian Avant-Garde, and kept vigorous correspondence (mail art) with Fluxus members (especially Matković and Szombathy).